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  • Shiquo Hii Style Store Was Not Raided, Anti-Counterfeit Authority Confirms; Says Influencer Used Empty Shelves for Content as She Relocates

    Shiquo Hii Style Store Was Not Raided, Anti-Counterfeit Authority Confirms; Says Influencer Used Empty Shelves for Content as She Relocates

    The Anti-Counterfeit Authority (ACA) has dismissed claims by social media personality and entrepreneur Shiquo Hii Style that her shoe business was raided and stock seized by enforcement officers, insisting that no operation was conducted at her Nairobi store.

    The authority’s response comes days after Shiquo sparked widespread debate online when she shared emotional videos claiming she had suffered massive losses after authorities allegedly confiscated shoes from her business in a crackdown on counterfeit goods.

    The posts quickly went viral, drawing sympathy from followers and reigniting a long-running conversation about Kenya’s thriving market for replica fashion products.

    But ACA says the story being told online does not match what happened on the ground.

    Speaking to the Nation, ACA Director of Enforcement Osman Yusuf flatly denied that the authority had carried out any raid at Shiquo’s shop located at RNG Plaza in Nairobi’s Central Business District.

    “There is no operation that was conducted by ACA at that shop. That is a pure lie,” Yusuf said.

    According to the enforcement chief, the authority is aware of ongoing anti-counterfeit operations linked to international investigations but maintains that Shiquo’s business was never among the premises targeted.

    Instead, ACA claims the empty shelves featured in videos shared online were the result of a planned relocation rather than an enforcement action.

    “The intelligence we have is that she was relocating from one shop to another and used empty shelves to portray a raid,” Yusuf said.

    The regulator later issued an official statement reiterating that it had not interfered with any legitimate business operation and that its enforcement activities are strictly limited to combating counterfeit trade.

    “ACA’s enforcement activities are directed exclusively at unlawful trade in counterfeit goods,” the authority said.

    The agency explained that whenever it conducts enforcement operations, inspectors are required by law to follow strict procedures, including documenting goods, maintaining inventories and preserving seized items pending investigations.

    It also noted that traders have a right to provide documentation proving the authenticity of their products and can challenge enforcement decisions through the courts.

    The controversy erupted after Shiquo posted a series of videos suggesting that all her stock had been confiscated, forcing her to start over.

    In one of the clips, she described the experience as a painful lesson for business owners dealing in products that may infringe on intellectual property rights.

    “Every piece of shoe was taken because they were counterfeit. There was a big problem. We have to start again, relearn, rebuild and do it again,” she said.

    She also warned other traders about the risks associated with selling products that imitate established brands.

    At the same time, Shiquo used the incident to reflect on the importance of building local brands, arguing that entrepreneurs should focus on creating their own products instead of relying on the popularity of international labels.

    “We can make our own brands and grow them slowly,” she said, citing global giants such as Nike and Adidas as examples of companies that started from scratch before becoming household names.

    Her claims sparked a heated online debate, with many Kenyans questioning why replica products are widely available in local markets if authorities later consider them illegal. Others argued that traders often operate in a grey area where counterfeit goods are openly sold despite periodic crackdowns.

    The dispute has once again put a spotlight on Nairobi’s bustling trade in imitation products, particularly in commercial hubs such as Eastleigh, Kamukunji and the Central Business District, where demand for cheaper alternatives to premium brands remains strong.

    For now, however, the Anti-Counterfeit Authority maintains that no raid took place at Shiquo Hii Style’s store, setting up a stark contradiction between the influencer’s public account and the regulator’s version of events.

  • Treasury CS Mbadi Unveils Sh4.8 Trillion Budget Estimates

    Treasury CS Mbadi Unveils Sh4.8 Trillion Budget Estimates

  • Fraud, Misrepresentation and A Decade Of Evasion: How Indo Africa Finance Pocketed Sh150 Million Youth Funds and Fought To Keep Every Cent

    Fraud, Misrepresentation and A Decade Of Evasion: How Indo Africa Finance Pocketed Sh150 Million Youth Funds and Fought To Keep Every Cent

    The notice on Indo Africa Finance Company Limited’s website is perfectly calibrated for a certain kind of trust. Founded in the early 1980s, the Museum Hill lender tells prospective borrowers it has spent four decades serving low-income earners in urban, rural and marginalised parts of Kenya. It offers logbook loans, LPO financing, salary advances and asset finance, promising approvals within twenty-four hours. It touts itself as a Kenswitch partner, talks proudly of over 20,000 accounts, and is led the website is at pains to emphasise by its founder and CEO, Leon Muriithi Ndubai.

    What the website does not mention is that a sitting High Court judge has now handed down a judgment that should make any rational person pause before putting money into, or accepting money from, this institution. Civil Case 80 of 2014, decided in 2026, is an inventory of broken promises, months of deliberate deception directed at a government agency, an aggressive counterclaim that sought to extract nearly three-quarters of a billion shillings from the public purse, and over a decade of litigation designed to delay accountability. The court rejected all of it.

    The victim was the Youth Enterprise Development Fund Board, a public body whose mandate is to expand credit access for Kenyan youth. The money involved was Sh150 million. The scheme was supposed to unlock Sh750 million in lending. What actually happened instead is a case study in how a private financial institution can fail a public-interest mandate and then use every available procedural mechanism to avoid answering for it.

    “To permit such a claim would amount to unjust enrichment at the expense of the Kenyan public.” — Justice F.G. Mugambi, High Court of Kenya

    THE ARCHITECTURE OF THE DEAL AND HOW INDO AFRICA BROKE IT

    In November 2012 the Youth Fund and Indo Africa Finance signed a Deed of Guarantee creating a Credit Guarantee Scheme. The structure was straightforward. The Youth Fund would contribute Sh150 million; Indo Africa would contribute Sh600 million; the combined Sh750 million portfolio would be deployed in lending to youth-owned enterprises across the country. To protect the public’s Sh150 million contribution against default risk, Indo Africa was contractually obligated to obtain a committed bank guarantee from a commercial bank specifically, African Banking Corporation Limited, known as ABC Bank.

    The Youth Fund, acting precisely on Indo Africa’s own written instructions and the account details Indo Africa nominated, remitted the Sh150 million into Indo Africa’s Co-operative Bank account at the Westlands branch. That money was then supposed to travel onwards to ABC Bank to activate the guarantee. It never did.

    For more than eight months after the money landed in Indo Africa’s account, the Youth Fund was told, in effect, that everything was in order. The guarantee existed. The scheme was running. The public capital was protected. None of that was true. In October 2013, ABC Bank wrote to the Youth Fund directly and confirmed there was no effective guarantee in place. Indo Africa had according to ABC Bank’s own letter, cited in court consistently misled ABC Bank into believing the Sh150 million had not even been released by the Youth Fund.

    There it was: a firm that had received public funds, told the government body that sent those funds the guarantee was active, and simultaneously told the commercial bank that was supposed to issue the guarantee that no funds had arrived. The Youth Fund then issued repeated demands for either a replacement guarantee from another commercial bank or a full refund. Indo Africa complied with neither. A final demand letter dated February 21, 2014 went unanswered. The Youth Fund filed suit.

    THE CEO WHO CALLED IT ‘HAPHAZARD’

    When the case first surfaced publicly around the time of the 2014 filing, CEO Leon Ndubai went to court and told Justice Jonathan Havelock that his organisation had not embezzled the youth money. The fund, he suggested, had conducted its transactions in a “haphazard manner” and was using the suit to malign both the institution and its chief executive personally. He acknowledged that his company had bid for and won the Credit Guarantee Scheme contract and that a deed of guarantee had been signed, but denied the Youth Fund’s version of events regarding where the money went and whether the guarantee had been activated.

    By the time Catherine Namuye, then head of the Youth Fund, took the stand, she had a paper trail that proved the contrary. ABC Bank had written to the Youth Fund in terms that were unambiguous: Indo Africa had consistently misled the bank about the status of the Sh150 million. Meetings had been held between Indo Africa, the Youth Fund and ABC Bank to try to resolve the matter. An ultimatum had been issued demanding a replacement guarantee by a specific date. Nothing came.

    THE COUNTER-OFFENSIVE: SUING ABC BANK AND DEMANDING SH761 MILLION FROM TAXPAYERS

    What happened next revealed a pattern that should trouble anyone attempting due diligence on this institution. Rather than settling a clear breach, Indo Africa launched its own legal offensive on two fronts simultaneously.

    First, in 2015, it filed a separate suit against ABC Bank, alleging that ABC had failed to honour or properly issue the Sh150 million guarantee despite Indo Africa making a deposit. Indo Africa claimed ABC’s failure to activate the guarantee caused the cancellation of the facility and the loss of the entire Sh750 million youth lending portfolio. In that suit, Indo Africa was explicitly attributing the losses it had suffered to ABC Bank’s conduct.

    Second, in the original Youth Fund case running concurrently Indo Africa filed a counterclaim for Sh761 million. That figure encompassed disbursement fees on the Sh750 million portfolio it claimed it had arranged, interest charges, costs of procuring guarantees, losses from blocked deposits, reputational damage and alleged lost business opportunities. The firm also claimed it had actually disbursed more than Sh581 million to youth enterprise beneficiaries under the programme.

    Justice F.G. Mugambi’s judgment deals with the counterclaim in terms that leave nothing to interpretation. The court observed that Indo Africa was attempting to recover enormous sums from the public purse for losses that, in a separate litigation, the same firm had attributed entirely to ABC Bank. You cannot, as a matter of law or basic logic, blame your commercial bank partner for the loss in one court while simultaneously demanding the government agency pay you for the same loss in another court. The judge branded the manoeuvre precisely what it was: an attempt at unjust enrichment at the expense of the Kenyan public. The entire Sh761 million counterclaim was dismissed for lack of merit.

    Indo Africa told the Youth Fund the guarantee was active. It told ABC Bank the money had never arrived. It told the court both versions, in different proceedings, depending on what was useful.

    THE JUDGMENT: EVERYTHING THE COURT FOUND

    Justice Mugambi upheld the validity and enforceability of the November 12, 2012 Deed of Guarantee in full. The court found that Indo Africa had breached its core contractual obligation to secure a committed commercial bank guarantee before the public funds were to be considered properly protected. The judge rejected the firm’s argument that the Youth Fund bore responsibility for depositing the money into the nominated Co-operative Bank account rather than directly to ABC Bank. The court ruled, as a matter of fact and law, that the Youth Fund had followed Indo Africa’s own instructions and could not be penalised for what Indo Africa subsequently failed to do with those funds.

    The doctrine of frustration a legal argument that a contract can be discharged when performance becomes impossible through no fault of either party was raised by Indo Africa and rejected by the court. The judge found that any difficulties with the guarantee were a direct consequence of Indo Africa’s own conduct and its failure to remedy the defect despite repeated opportunities over many months, including the final February 2014 demand letter.

    The court’s orders: Indo Africa Finance is directed to refund the full Sh150 million to the Youth Enterprise Development Fund Board, plus interest running at six per cent above the prevailing Central Bank of Kenya indicative lending rate from May 14, 2014, until the date of final payment. On top of that interest burden which, calculated from 2014 to 2026, represents over twelve years of compounding liability — the court awarded costs against Indo Africa. An injunction has been issued barring the firm from touching funds in its Co-operative Bank Westlands branch account except for the purpose of settling the judgment debt.

    THE COURT RECORD BEYOND THIS CASE: A PATTERN ACROSS YEARS

    Civil Case 80 of 2014 is not an isolated dispute. Kenya Law records document Indo Africa Finance appearing in court across multiple jurisdictions and over multiple decades, revealing a firm that has spent considerable legal resources on both prosecution and defence of commercial and employment claims.

    In 1996 the Court of Appeal considered a matter involving Forest Lodge Limited and Indo Africa Finance Company Limited against Ari Credit and Finance Limited, Deltex Agencies Limited and K.S. Gheewala a dispute pointing to contested financial dealings dating back more than three decades.

    In 2014, a former employee, Martin Anyango, filed a cause against Indo Africa Finance in the Employment and Labour Relations Court. That case sat in the court system for six years before Justice Maureen Atieno Onyango delivered judgment on January 24, 2020, awarding the claim. The fact that an employment claim against this institution required half a decade to resolve, and that the outcome was an award in the employee’s favour, raises questions about how the firm manages its internal obligations to staff the same staff it presents publicly as the human face of its financial inclusion mission.

    In 2017, the firm filed a miscellaneous application in the High Court against David Omondi Ochieng, a borrower who had taken a Sh500,000 logbook loan secured against his vehicle. Indo Africa repossessed the vehicle when a balance of just Sh52,071 remained outstanding, proceeded to move toward a forced sale, and was met with an injunction compelling it to release the car. The application was dismissed. What the case illustrates is that Indo Africa’s approach to its retail borrowers the very low-income and marginalised Kenyans it claims to serve includes moving swiftly toward repossession and auction when tiny sums remain outstanding, even where the borrower has largely repaid.

    Then in 2015 came the suit against ABC Bank for Sh7.895 million in interest it alleged ABC owed following the failed guarantee arrangement. In those proceedings, Indo Africa told the court that ABC had cancelled the bank guarantee and communicated to the Youth Fund, causing Indo Africa to lose its Sh750 million loan portfolio. That is the same transaction, the same loss, and a directly contradictory allocation of blame to what Indo Africa was simultaneously arguing in the Youth Fund case.

    Three decades of litigation. Sh761 million demanded from taxpayers. A borrower’s car repossessed over a Sh52,000 balance. An employee’s claim grinding through court for six years. A failed guarantee and months of misrepresentation. This is the complete public record.

    THE REGULATORY BLIND SPOT: WHO IS WATCHING THIS FIRM?

    Kenyan microfinance law bifurcates the sector. Deposit-taking microfinance institutions are licensed and regulated by the Central Bank of Kenya under the Microfinance Act 2006, which became operational in 2008. They are supervised, examined and required to meet ongoing capital and governance standards.

    Credit-only microfinance institutions — those that lend but do not take deposits from the public — operate in a different universe. They require only standard business licences to operate. The CBK does not examine them. The Microfinance Act does not apply to them. This means that a credit-only MFI can receive public funds under a government guarantee scheme, mishandle those funds for years, litigate aggressively to avoid accountability, and face no parallel regulatory consequence while the court proceedings drag on.

    Indo Africa Finance, as it presents itself, is precisely such a credit-only institution. It is not listed among the nine CBK-licensed deposit-taking microfinance banks. It operates from Museum Hill Centre, extends loans across multiple asset classes, and claims over 20,000 accounts but the Central Bank has no direct supervisory jurisdiction over its day-to-day lending practices or governance. For the Youth Fund, this regulatory gap was consequential: there was no regulator to call when Indo Africa began stonewalling, no examiner who could require the firm to produce records, no supervisory body to issue a directive. The only avenue was the courts. It took twelve years.

    THE COUNTERCLAIM THAT REVEALED EVERYTHING

    It bears dwelling on the Sh761 million counterclaim because it is perhaps the most revealing single document in this entire twelve-year dispute. Consider what Indo Africa was actually arguing when it filed it: that the Youth Fund should pay it nearly three-quarters of a billion shillings in fees, interest and damages arising from a deal that collapsed entirely because Indo Africa failed to activate the bank guarantee it had contracted to provide.

    The components of the claim included disbursement fees on a Sh750 million portfolio that was never actually deployed money Indo Africa says it was owed for a lending programme that did not function because of its own breach. It included costs of procuring guarantees costs incurred in attempting to rectify a default Indo Africa itself had created. It included reputational damage and loss of business opportunities claimed by a firm that, on the court’s findings, was the author of its own reputational exposure through misrepresentation to a government agency.

    Most troublingly, some of the claimed losses in the counterclaim overlapped precisely with losses Indo Africa was simultaneously attributing to ABC Bank in the separate 2015 proceedings. The court’s observation was surgical: you cannot recover from the Youth Fund for losses you have pleaded were caused by ABC Bank. The attempt to do so was not a technical legal error. It was an attempt to double-dip from two sources simultaneously for the same alleged harm, with the Kenyan taxpayer as one of the intended payers.

    LEON NDUBAI AND THE MASK OF VICTIMHOOD

    Throughout the public phase of this dispute, CEO Leon Ndubai consistently positioned himself and his institution as the wronged party. In 2014 and again around 2020 when the case surfaced in media coverage, his public statements characterised the Youth Fund’s claims as malicious, accused the Fund of haphazard transaction management, and denied any diversion or misuse of the Sh150 million. He told a court that his company had successfully disbursed more than Sh581 million to youth beneficiaries under the programme.

    The High Court’s findings sit in direct contradiction to this narrative. The court found that Indo Africa misrepresented the position to the Youth Fund for more than eight months. It found that ABC Bank confirmed to the Youth Fund that Indo Africa had consistently misled that bank about whether the Sh150 million had been released. It found that Indo Africa failed to activate the contracted security despite multiple opportunities and demands. It found that the firm’s defence of good faith was unavailing. It found the counterclaim without merit.

    The court record does not contain findings of criminal fraud. This is a civil judgment on breach of contract, misrepresentation and unjust enrichment. But the conduct documented in that judgment receiving public money on the strength of a contracted commitment, failing to perform that commitment, misleading the contracting party about its status for months, then litigating for over a decade and attempting to extract additional hundreds of millions from the public purse is a governance record that speaks for itself.

    WHAT THIS MEANS FOR ANYONE DOING BUSINESS WITH INDO AFRICA FINANCE

    For a prospective borrower considering a logbook loan, LPO facility, salary advance or any other credit product from Indo Africa Finance, this judgment is essential reading. The court record on the Ochieng logbook case shows a firm willing to move toward vehicle repossession and forced sale when a Sh52,000 balance remained on a substantially repaid Sh500,000 loan. In a sector where credit-only MFIs operate with minimal external supervision, borrower protections depend almost entirely on the terms of individual loan agreements and the willingness of courts to intervene. This institution has demonstrated it will litigate rather than settle.

    For any government ministry, state corporation, county government or parastatal considering entering a financial arrangement with Indo Africa Finance whether a guarantee scheme, a wholesale lending facility, a partnership on an empowerment programme, or any other public-private collaboration involving public funds the Youth Fund judgment is the definitive due diligence document. The Sh150 million was in this firm’s account for years. The guarantee it had contracted to provide was never activated. The firm denied liability for over a decade. The court has now ordered the money returned, with twelve-plus years of compounding interest.

    For investors or shareholders in Indo Africa Finance, the judgment represents an unquantified but material liability sitting on the balance sheet of a credit-only microfinance institution that, by virtue of its regulatory status, is not subject to CBK capital adequacy requirements or prudential supervision. The question of whether the firm can actually satisfy a judgment encompassing Sh150 million principal plus twelve years of interest at CBK base rate plus six per cent — while its account is under injunction is one that anyone with equity exposure to this firm needs to ask immediately.

    For the Central Bank of Kenya and the Treasury Registrar of State Corporations, which oversees the Youth Enterprise Development Fund, this case raises systemic questions about the adequacy of due diligence required of credit-only MFIs before they are permitted to participate in government guarantee schemes. Indo Africa bid for and won a Sh750 million public lending mandate. It was not a CBK-supervised institution. Nobody required it to demonstrate, before the public money was released, that the contracted bank guarantee actually existed. Twelve years and one High Court judgment later, that oversight gap has cost the public treasury Sh150 million plus accrued interest.

    THE INJUNCTION, THE INTEREST, AND THE CLOCK

    The practical situation facing Indo Africa Finance as of this publication is stark. The Co-operative Bank Westlands branch account — the same account into which the Youth Fund deposited the original Sh150 million in 2012 is under court injunction. The firm cannot move those funds except to satisfy the judgment debt. The interest meter has been running since May 14, 2014. At CBK lending rates historically averaging between ten and fourteen per cent, six per cent above that base represents an annual charge in excess of sixteen per cent on the principal. Applied over twelve years to Sh150 million, the total liability is substantially above Sh150 million. The precise figure will depend on the CBK indicative rate prevailing at the date of payment, but on any reasonable calculation the interest alone now exceeds the original principal.

    Indo Africa has the option of appealing. Given its litigation history in this matter twelve years, multiple fronts, a dismissed counterclaim — it would be consistent with past behaviour to pursue the appellate route. If an appeal is filed, the injunction will likely be contested. Borrowers, counterparties and the public should watch that space.

    CONCLUSION: THE RECORD IS NOW PUBLIC. USE IT.

    Indo Africa Finance Company Limited has spent four decades presenting itself as a responsible financial partner to low-income Kenyans, to government empowerment programmes, and to the small businesses that form the backbone of the informal economy. The High Court judgment in Civil Case 80 of 2014 provides the definitive counternarrative to that self-presentation, delivered not by a competitor or a political opponent but by a sitting judge of the Republic of Kenya after examining the evidence in an adversarial proceeding in which Indo Africa had every opportunity to put its best case forward.

    The court found that it failed to honour the most basic term of a public-private partnership: provide the security you promised. It found that it misrepresented the position to a government agency for more than eight months. It found that its counterclaim for Sh761 million from the public purse was an attempt at unjust enrichment without merit. It froze its bank account and ordered the money returned.

    That is the record. It has existed in court files for twelve years. It is now public. Every borrower, every government counterparty, every potential investor, every regulator and every journalist covering Kenya’s microfinance sector now has a court-stamped, judge-signed document against which to measure the institution’s public claims about itself. Indo Africa Finance has been found by the High Court of Kenya to have failed a public mandate through breach and misrepresentation.

    The public is entitled to its Sh150 million back. The institution is entitled to nothing more. That is where the law stands.

  • ‪Kenya Picks Chinese Firm For Sh375 Billion JKIA Upgrade Project After Adani Fallout‬

    ‪Kenya Picks Chinese Firm For Sh375 Billion JKIA Upgrade Project After Adani Fallout‬

    The company reportedly being considered to take over the planned Ksh375 billion expansion of Nairobi’s Jomo Kenyatta International Airport (JKIA) is China Communications Construction Company (CCCC), one of the world’s largest state-owned infrastructure firms.

    CCCC was involved with the design and construction of two of the most important infrastructure projects in Kenya in the past ten years: the Mombasa-Nairobi standard gauge railway and the Nairobi-Naivasha railway extension.

    The company has a huge portfolio in ports, railways and highways and major transportation hubs, making it a possible contender if Kenya decides to move forward with plans for the modernisation of JKIA after the Adani deal fell through. It could also expand China’s presence in Kenya’s infrastructure sector, where its contractors have been at the centre of delivering many flagship projects.

    China Communications Construction Company (CCCC) was established on October 8, 2006, following a restructuring initiative approved by China’s State Council and spearheaded by its parent company, China Communications Construction Group (CCCG), a state-owned enterprise supervised by the State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission (SASAC).

    CCCC is the world’s largest port, road and bridge design and construction enterprise, the world’s largest dredging enterprise and the owner of the world’s largest engineering fleet. It has 33 large-scale subsidiaries and is present in 139 countries and regions.

    The company has many flagship projects, such as the Hong Kong–Zhuhai–Macau Bridge, the Shanghai Yangshan Deepwater Port and China’s many high-speed railway networks.

    The company made history later that year by becoming the first ultra-large Chinese state-owned infrastructure enterprise to enter the international capital market when its shares were listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange in December 2006.

    In March 2012, CCCC further strengthened its financial standing by listing its A-shares on the Shanghai Stock Exchange, marking another significant milestone in its growth journey.

    Over the years, CCCC has grown into one of the world’s largest and most influential infrastructure companies. It is widely recognised as a leader in transportation infrastructure, with core operations spanning infrastructure construction, engineering design, and dredging.

    Drawing on decades of experience and technical expertise gained from major projects across diverse sectors, the company provides integrated solutions covering every stage of infrastructure development, from planning and design to construction and maintenance.

    The company is regarded as the world’s largest port, road, and bridge design and construction contractor, as well as the largest dredging company globally. It is also China’s biggest

    Its global portfolio includes some of the most ambitious transportation and infrastructure projects ever undertaken, cementing its reputation as a key player in the development of modern infrastructure across Asia, Africa, Europe, and Latin America.

    Jomo Kenyatta International Airport (JKIA) departure terminal in Nairobi.

    This follows a decision in November 2024 by President William Ruto to cancel the deal, which was to involve Adani Group spending billions of shillings on expanding and modernising the country’s busiest airport under a public-private partnership contract.

    The cancellation came as the controversy over Gautam Adani and some of his associates over bribery and fraud charges was mounting in the United States.

    The Adani Group has dismissed the charges, but the events sparked outrage among the public and further opposition to the JKIA project from politicians, aviation stakeholders, labour unions and civil society activists.

    The lack of clarity in the procurement process and the length of the proposed concession had been raised as concerns by critics, along with a question about the effects of the concession on a strategic national asset.

    President Ruto, in response, ordered government entities to immediately suspend the procurement of the airport expansion project with Adani and seek alternative investors to finance the project.

  • The President’s Daughter and The Missing Witness: How Adut Salva Kiir’s Shadow Treasury Silenced Its Most Dangerous Critic

    The President’s Daughter and The Missing Witness: How Adut Salva Kiir’s Shadow Treasury Silenced Its Most Dangerous Critic

    KEY INDIVIDUALS

    Adut Salva Kiir Mayardit — Eldest daughter of President Salva Kiir Mayardit; Senior Presidential Envoy for Special Programmes since August 2025; alleged principal of Crawford Capital / CapitalPay network; named by Athorbey in his safety filings as the person to investigate should he be harmed.

    Garang Mayom Kuoc Malek — CEO and Managing Director of Crawford Capital; holds approximately 68 percent of the company and 61.2 percent of CapitalPay; named alongside Adut in Athorbey’s safety filings.

    Ariech Wol Mayar Ariec (Ariech Mayar Wol) — CFO and Chair of Crawford Capital / CapitalPay; alleged financier of the abduction operation.

    Jeremy Gisemba — Kenyan businessman and significant shareholder in Crawford Capital and CapitalPay.

    Akec Tong — Director General of the NSS Internal Security Bureau; allegedly issued the arrest warrant for Athorbey on fabricated espionage charges.

    Brigadier General Rizik Dominic Samuel — Director General, National Communications Authority; named in the Crawford network chart.

    James Wani Igga — Vice President of South Sudan; overruled Trade Minister Atong Kuol Manyang Juuk’s suspension of Crawford Capital operations in March 2026, directly protecting the network.

    Athorbey Al-Gaddhaffy-Dit (Gadafi Athorbey Guet, ‘Daffi’) — Kenyan-South Sudanese whistleblower, businessman, and Crawford Capital exposé source; abducted from Nairobi on June 10, 2026 and transported to military intelligence detention in Juba; suffers underlying medical conditions.


    THE SNATCHING

    The last person to speak with Athorbey Gadafi Guet before his world went dark was his wife. She told Radio Tamazuj she last heard his voice at approximately 10:19 p.m. on Monday, June 8. By 3 a.m. on the Wednesday morning, when he had still not come home and his phone lines had gone dead, she knew the moment she had long dreaded had arrived.

    According to a police report filed at Kilimani Police Station and seen by AFP, Athorbey had left Lucky 8 Casino near Yaya Centre in Nairobi’s upmarket Kilimani district and boarded a Bolt ride arranged by casino staff. What happened next took no more than minutes. A white pickup carrying masked, armed men blocked his vehicle, overpowered him at gunpoint and bundled him inside. His wife, tracing his phone’s last signal to a hospital on Kiambu Road and finding nothing, received a call from a relative who had seen the police report. Her husband was gone.

    Amnesty International Kenya moved with unusual speed, issuing a statement within hours expressing grave concern and naming what it believed was happening: an enforced disappearance. The rights organisation said it believed Athorbey was being held at Jomo Kenyatta International Airport awaiting deportation to South Sudan and described the incident as bearing the hallmarks of a grave violation of both Kenyan and international law.

    “If Mr Gaddhaffy-Dit is suspected of any offence, the only lawful course of action is to proceed through Kenya’s justice system, not through abduction, incommunicado detention, and deportation.” — Amnesty International Kenya

    The deportation feared by Amnesty swiftly materialised. Sources in the border towns of Lokichoggio and Nadapal confirmed that Athorbey was driven across the Kenyan frontier and transported toward Juba, where he arrived at a military intelligence detention facility. He is now reportedly held on fabricated espionage charges, the arrest warrant allegedly issued by Akec Tong, Director General of the National Security Service’s Internal Security Bureau. He is accused, in the darkly ironic language of authoritarian retribution, of leaking information about Crawford Capital.

    As for who gave the order: multiple sources with direct knowledge of the operation have identified Adut Salva Kiir Mayardit and Garang Mayom Kuoch as the principals behind the abduction. The operation is said to have been financed by Ariech Wol Mayar Ariec, who serves as CFO and Chair of Crawford and CapitalPay, and by elements within the National Communications Authority leadership.

    Athorbey had anticipated this. Before he disappeared, he filed statements at multiple Nairobi police stations warning that if he were harmed, abducted, or killed, investigators should examine links to Adut Salva Kiir and Garang Mayom Kuoch. Those statements are now evidence of something far worse than he hoped they would ever be used for.

    Athorbey Al-Gaddhaffy-Dit, also styled Gadafi Athorbey Guet or ‘Daffi’, holds dual Kenyan-South Sudanese citizenship. His abduction therefore also constitutes a violation of Kenyan sovereignty and a failure of Kenya’s duty to protect its own citizens. Relatives confirm he has underlying medical conditions requiring regular attention; the conditions in military intelligence facilities in South Sudan are not compatible with adequate care.

    THE MACHINE HE EXPOSED: CRAWFORD CAPITAL’S ARCHITECTURE OF PLUNDER

    To understand why a man was snatched from the streets of Nairobi in the dead of night, you must first understand what he knew. And what Athorbey Al-Gaddhaffy-Dit knew about Crawford Capital Ltd. was enough to embarrass a president, implicate a president’s daughter, and help trigger sanctions from the world’s most powerful nation.

    Crawford Capital Ltd. is registered in the United Kingdom, a corporate detail that has allowed it to present itself as a legitimate fintech company while functioning as something altogether different: a private tax collection bureau operated primarily for the benefit of South Sudan’s ruling elite. Its operational arm, CapitalPay, controls the country’s entire e-government service delivery infrastructure, the electronic gateway through which businesses must pass for e-visas, trade permits, customs clearances, and crucially the Electronic Crude Oil Accreditation Permit, the ECOAP system through which every single barrel of South Sudanese crude oil exported must be cleared.

    Crawford secured its stranglehold through a November 2019 no-bid contract with the Ministry of Information, Communication Technology and Postal Services, signed under Minister Thomas Tut Lam. The terms of that contract, reviewed by the United Nations Commission on Human Rights in South Sudan and reported on extensively by Radio Tamazuj and other investigators, are staggering in their audacity. Under the arrangement, Crawford retains 75 percent of all revenues collected through its platforms. The South Sudanese government, the owner of the taxes being collected and the supposed custodian of the public interest, receives 25 cents for every shilling that should flow to its treasury.

    The UN Commission’s September 2025 report, titled Plundering a Nation: How Rampant Corruption Unleashed a Human Rights Crisis in South Sudan, described profit splits of this nature as unjustifiable and indicative of abuse of public office. The more precise word is robbery. Banks were reportedly directed to route non-oil revenues into accounts controlled by Crawford rather than official treasury channels, severing the public money supply from the public good entirely.

    The crude oil levy alone illustrates the scale of the haemorrhage. Every cargo of South Sudanese crude requires ECOAP clearance, with a 0.03 percent levy on cargo values flowing directly to CapitalPay. Single shipments have generated fees of between 146,000 and 166,000 US dollars. South Sudan exported 22 cargoes of Dar and Nile blend crude oil between January and October 2025 alone. The financial accumulation for Crawford and its principals over the years of the contract is, as the UN Commission noted, enormous.

    The humanitarian cost of this arrangement is not abstract. Between 2020 and 2024, less than 48 percent of collected non-oil revenues reached core government services. Health received under 0.9 percent of the national budget on average. Education received approximately 2.3 percent. In a country where, despite receiving more than 25 billion US dollars in oil-related inflows since independence in 2011, more than half the population faces acute food insecurity and four million citizens have been displaced, the Crawford arrangement was not merely corrupt. According to the UN Commission’s own framing, it was a direct driver of the human rights catastrophe gripping the country.

    “Crawford’s e-Services, implemented through Crawford Capital Ltd., have facilitated organised corruption and predation, resulting in further revenue diversion.” — UN Commission on Human Rights in South Sudan, September 2025

    In 2024, Crawford’s reach extended even further into the humanitarian sector. The company extended an unlawful fuel import levy onto tax-exempt humanitarian organisations, including organisations supplying critical food aid operations. The UN Commission documented how this move contributed to the suspension of World Food Programme distributions at a moment when tens of millions of South Sudanese were already facing acute starvation. A company capturing 75 percent of national revenues was not content with that bounty; it reached into the lifeline supplies keeping children alive and took a cut from those too.

    The 2022 Ebola and COVID preparedness project deepened the pattern. A 10 million dollar advance disbursed for pandemic response was never fully accounted for, illustrating how the Crawford network used every crisis, digital, fiscal, or public health, as another opportunity for financial extraction.

    ADUT AT THE APEX: THE SHADOW TREASURY AND ITS ARCHITECT

    The formal ownership structure of Crawford Capital lists Garang Mayom Kuoc Malek as holding approximately 68 percent of the company and 61.2 percent of CapitalPay, with Kenyan businessman Jeremy Gisemba holding a significant stake alongside him. Ariech Mayar Wol serves as CFO and Chair. Ruey Majok Guandong, the other co-founder, rounds out the disclosed principals. On paper, this is a private fintech company with South Sudanese and Kenyan shareholders, no more and no less.

    But accountability researchers circulating an organisational chart titled The Crawford/CapitalPay Looting Squad have placed a different face at the very top. That face belongs to Adut Salva Kiir Mayardit, the eldest daughter of President Salva Kiir and the woman currently serving as Senior Presidential Envoy for Special Programmes. Africa Confidential, the authoritative intelligence outlet reporting on the continent since 1960, described Crawford’s network as her shadow treasury. The description has proven durable because every piece of subsequent investigation has reinforced it.

    The connection between Adut and Crawford runs deeper than a simple accusation. Garang Mayom Kuoc Malek and Ruey Majok Guandong, Crawford’s co-founders, have a documented history of forming companies with politically connected individuals. Notably, radio Tamazuj’s investigation revealed that the same Malek and Guandong previously formed a company together with Mayar Salva Kiir, the President’s son, through a vehicle called Air Afrik Aviation Limited in 2013. The Kiir family’s commercial entanglement with these same founders predates Crawford by years.

    Syracuse University professor Jok Madut Jok, one of South Sudan’s most respected scholars, told Radio Tamazuj in an interview published this week that Adut’s position as Presidential Envoy for Special Programmes operates without any clear constitutional basis, mandate, or limits of authority. She has effectively created a power centre outside all formal institutions, answerable to no one but her father, and wielding influence over the economic architecture of the state.

    The succession dimension is the most alarming element of this picture. Sources cited by Radio Tamazuj indicate that Adut is actively being discussed in political circles as a candidate for Vice President in place of James Wani Igga, and possibly as First Deputy Chair of the ruling Sudan People’s Liberation Movement, a positioning that would place her directly on the trajectory to inherit power from her ailing father. Those within her networks, Professor Jok told Tamazuj, have heard her express precisely these ambitions.

    The Crisis Group, in a March 2026 briefing, confirmed how Kiir has dramatically concentrated power within his family as his health has deteriorated and his circle of trust has shrunk. In October 2024, Kiir dismissed his long-serving intelligence chief, General Akol Koor Kuc. He then removed long-time Vice President James Wani Igga, briefly elevated business associate Benjamin Bol Mel, and later reversed that decision. In August 2025, with his succession options narrowing and his family loyalties sharpening, he appointed Adut to the senior envoy role. The consolidation of the Crawford revenue machine and the consolidation of Adut’s political ambitions are not separate stories. They are one story.

    BACKGROUND: Adut Salva Kiir Mayardit is the eldest child of President Salva Kiir Mayardit and First Lady Mary Ayen Mayardit. She is also known as the founder and chairperson of the Adut Salva Kiir Foundation (ASK), a nominally philanthropic vehicle through which she has cultivated a public profile. She assumed the Presidential Envoy role on August 21, 2025.

    THE PROTECTED COMPANY: HOW CRAWFORD SURVIVED EVERY CHALLENGE

    That Crawford Capital has survived multiple attempts to scrutinise or suspend its operations is not an accident. It is the direct result of presidential family protection deployed at every level of government.

    The most dramatic episode unfolded in March 2026. Trade and Industry Minister Atong Kuol Manyang Juuk issued a formal directive on March 5 halting Crawford’s operations pending a 90-day review. It was a courageous move, and it lasted less than 24 hours in effective terms. Vice President James Wani Igga, writing to the minister, told her that her unilateral decision violated the principle of administrative order and the rule of law. Igga invoked the authority of the Council of Ministers, citing Resolution 34/2024 as formal cabinet endorsement of the Crawford contract, a resolution presided over by the President himself. The suspension was overturned. Crawford continued operating.

    The parliamentary route fared no better. A parliamentary committee moved to support the minister’s position, only to find itself outmanoeuvred by the same mechanisms of executive protection. Crawford’s contract, its ownership, its revenue arrangements, and its political patrons have never been subjected to parliamentary oversight, competitive bidding processes, or published contractual frameworks. The government’s own South Sudan Revenue Authority has been accused by the UN Commission of complicity in the arrangements.

    Then came Washington. On May 12, 2026, the United States State Department imposed sanctions on Crawford Capital Ltd., naming it as a corrupt entity that had siphoned money from South Sudan’s treasury and stolen foreign assistance funds intended to support the South Sudanese people. Visa restrictions were simultaneously applied to associated officials. For a company that had draped itself in the veneer of UK corporate respectability, US sanctions were a catastrophic reputational blow.

    Juba’s response was immediate and furious. At least four government ministries and the national revenue authority issued defensive statements within a day. The regime argued that Crawford was a legitimate digital services provider delivering government modernisation. It pointed to the company’s formal contract. It said the UN Commission’s findings were intended to disparage the South Sudanese people. What it could not explain was why a supposedly legitimate government technology contractor needed to keep 75 percent of the nation’s taxes.

    SILENCING THE WITNESSES: A PATTERN OF TRANSNATIONAL REPRESSION

    Athorbey Al-Gaddhaffy-Dit

    The abduction of Athorbey Al-Gaddhaffy-Dit did not emerge from nowhere. It is the most extreme expression of a pattern that sources inside the Crawford network and inside Juba’s political circles have been documenting for months.

    As international scrutiny of Crawford intensified following the US sanctions and the global circulation of the Looting Squad organogram, Adut Salva Kiir allegedly turned her coercive apparatus inward. Multiple sources have described her ordering the arrest of business associates and employees suspected of leaking sensitive information about her financial empire. She has reportedly used government mechanisms to file criminal cases against individuals outside South Sudan who possess knowledge of her financial dealings, designating them enemies of the state engaged in espionage. Athorbey was not the first person in her network to face these threats. He was simply the one foolish enough, or brave enough, to go public.

    What made Athorbey a uniquely dangerous target was the specificity and credibility of his knowledge. A Kenyan-South Sudanese citizen with direct familiarity with the inner workings of the Crawford structure, he had been circulating information about the company’s ownership network, revenue arrangements, and political connections. His materials, passed to investigative outlets and international accountability bodies, contributed to the evidentiary foundation that eventually informed UN reports and US sanctions decisions. He knew exactly how the money flowed, who benefited, and which officials had signed what. That knowledge, in Juba’s calculus, made him not merely an inconvenience but an existential threat.

    His preemptive police filings in Nairobi, explicitly naming Adut and Garang Mayom Kuoch as the people to investigate if he came to harm, were a calculated attempt to create a deterrent. He understood what he was dealing with. The deterrent failed. The abduction was authorised anyway.

    The message sent to the wider network around Crawford is now impossible to misread. If you worked for Adut, if you had access to documents, if you spoke to journalists or international investigators, you are now being watched and potentially targeted. Sources within the network who spoke to this publication did so only under strict conditions of anonymity, describing an atmosphere of intense fear.

    “Eventually, just like those who worked for her father, you may end up exiled, disappeared, dead, or jailed.” — Warning circulated in South Sudanese opposition networks, June 2026

    Athorbey is also not the only person believed to have been taken from Kenya in connection with the Crawford investigation, according to sources at the Kenyan border. The full scope of this transnational repression operation remains unclear, and Kenyan investigative and immigration authorities have yet to offer any public accounting of what they knew, when they knew it, and what role, if any, their personnel played in facilitating or ignoring the removal of a Kenyan citizen from Kenyan soil.

    KENYA’S COMPLICITY PROBLEM

    Kenya’s record on the forced removal of South Sudanese nationals has not been clean, and the international community has not forgotten. The deaths of South Sudanese figures previously transferred from Kenya to Juba under murky circumstances, cases that civil society organisations have cited in their condemnations of the current abduction, loom over the Kenyan government’s response to the Athorbey case.

    Amnesty International Kenya, in its June 10 statement, was blunt: Athorbey Al-Gaddhaffy-Dit holds Kenyan citizenship. Abducting a Kenyan citizen at gunpoint in the capital, holding him at JKIA, and transferring him to a foreign intelligence facility on fabricated charges is not a matter for diplomatic discretion. It is a violation of Kenyan law, Kenyan sovereignty, and Kenya’s obligations under the 1951 Refugee Convention and the 1969 OAU Convention, both of which prohibit refoulement to persecution.

    Kenya has spent years cultivating its reputation as a regional hub for international organisations, diplomatic missions, and civil society bodies precisely because of its nominal commitment to the rule of law. Every time Nairobi allows a foreign government to conduct an enforced disappearance on Kenyan soil, that reputation corrodes further. Kenya’s silence in the initial hours and days following Athorbey’s abduction has been conspicuous and damaging.

    It is tempting, when writing about companies and contracts and revenue splits, to lose sight of what those numbers mean on the ground in South Sudan. The UN Commission’s data does not permit that abstraction.

    Since independence in 2011, South Sudan has received more than 25 billion US dollars in oil-related inflows. It has consistently ranked at or near the bottom of every global human development index. More than half its population faces acute food insecurity. The health system has functionally collapsed. Education spending has averaged around 2.3 percent of the budget in the years of Crawford’s operation. The President’s personal medical budget, the UN Commission found, exceeded the government’s total expenditure on public health.

    Crawford Capital did not single-handedly create this catastrophe. The catastrophe has been decades in the making, built from civil war, elite predation, ethnic violence, and international indifference. But as the UN Commission concluded, Crawford became one of its most efficient instruments in the digital era. Every percentage point captured by the 75/25 split was a percentage point that did not reach a hospital in Juba, a school in Jonglei, a food distribution in Upper Nile.

    The 10 million dollars advanced for Ebola and COVID preparedness in 2022, which disappeared without full accounting, represents roughly the same amount that the government spent on health for hundreds of thousands of South Sudanese in an entire quarter. The fuel levy extended to humanitarian agencies in 2024, the one that contributed to WFP distribution suspensions, placed a financial toll on the organisations trying to prevent mass starvation in a country where 70 percent of the population already required humanitarian assistance.

    This is what Athorbey Al-Gaddhaffy-Dit was exposing. Not an abstract financial scandal. A machine that had been eating the South Sudanese state alive from the inside for seven years, protected at every turn by the President’s daughter, her business associates, and the coercive apparatus of a regime that has never hesitated to use violence against its critics.

    THE RECKONING THAT CANNOT BE STOPPED

    Adut Salva Kiir’s response to international exposure has been to escalate. Arrests. Threats. Disappearances. The seizure of a Kenyan citizen from a Nairobi street at 3 a.m. by masked operatives. Each escalation has produced not silence but the opposite: more coverage, more investigations, more international attention, more sanctions. The regime’s desperation is visible in the crudeness of its methods.

    Major international news organisations are now actively investigating Crawford’s contracts, ownership structures, and the human cost of the 75/25 arrangement. Africa Confidential, Radio Tamazuj, the Global Trade Review, AFP, and accountability networks from New York to London are all on this story. The UN Commission has issued 54 detailed recommendations to the South Sudanese government. The United States has landed direct financial sanctions on the revenue machine that has been shielding the presidential family. And now the abduction of a whistleblower who explicitly named Adut and Garang Mayom Kuoch in his safety filings has confirmed, in the starkest possible terms, what the accountability community has been arguing for years: this network will not stop until someone forces it to.

    The Kenyan government must act. It has an obligation to demand Athorbey’s immediate and unconditional release, to investigate how a Kenyan citizen was removed from Kenyan territory without judicial process, and to hold accountable any Kenyan officials who facilitated or ignored the operation. Failure to do so is not neutrality. It is complicity.

    The United Kingdom, as the jurisdiction in which Crawford Capital Ltd. is registered and where its corporate existence is maintained, has accountability obligations of its own. UK financial crime investigators have the authority to examine the flow of funds through a UK-registered entity subject to US sanctions. The question of how a company collecting national revenues in South Sudan, retaining three quarters of those revenues for itself, and protecting that arrangement through the abduction of witnesses, maintains its UK registration in good standing is one that Companies House and the Financial Conduct Authority should be asking loudly and publicly.

    As for Crawford Capital itself, the game is over. The organogram is public. The ownership is documented. The UN Commission report is on the record. The US sanctions are in force. The arrest of Athorbey Al-Gaddhaffy-Dit, far from burying the story, has guaranteed that Crawford Capital’s name will now appear in every future UN Security Council debate on South Sudan, in every future US foreign policy review of the region, and in every future accountability audit of revenue diversion in fragile states.

    Adut Salva Kiir believed she could build a shadow treasury beneath the ruins of her father’s government, capture the digital arteries of a broken state, and silence anyone who noticed. She has instead created the most thoroughly documented corruption scandal in South Sudan’s history, triggered the most significant US unilateral action against Juba’s ruling elite in years, and ensured that the name Crawford Capital will follow her, and her father’s legacy, into every historical account of how South Sudan failed its people.

    Athorbey Al-Gaddhaffy-Dit must be released immediately. His medical conditions are known. His captors are named. The world is watching.

    The South Sudanese people have paid for this empire with their hunger, their displacement, their children’s future, and now with the disappearance of one of the men brave enough to document what was being done to them. The reckoning is not coming. It is already here.

    — — —

  • Kisii Under Siege: Governor Arati’s Wife Accused of Hijacking IFMIS and Running a Parallel Government

    Kisii Under Siege: Governor Arati’s Wife Accused of Hijacking IFMIS and Running a Parallel Government

    For years, Governor Paul Simba Arati has cultivated the image of a fearless political fighter, a combative leader willing to take on rivals, security agencies and entrenched interests in Kisii politics. Since his election in 2022, he has positioned himself as a reformer determined to clean up county government and accelerate development.

    But a growing chorus of current and former county officials now claims that the biggest challenge facing Kisii County is not political opposition, budget constraints or interference from Nairobi. They allege that power has quietly shifted away from formal government offices into the hands of an unelected figure operating from the governor’s rural home in Motonto, Bobasi Constituency.

    At the centre of the claims is Mei Arati, the governor’s Chinese-born wife, popularly known across Kisii as “Kwamboka” because of her fluent command of Ekegusii and her deep immersion in local culture. Over the past two years, she has built a public reputation as a community mobiliser and peace broker, often appearing at public functions and political gatherings.

    Behind that public image, however, county insiders describe a vastly different reality.

    Multiple officials who spoke on condition of anonymity claim that Mei Arati has become the most powerful figure in the county administration, allegedly influencing payments, procurement decisions, personnel matters and the movement of public funds through the Integrated Financial Management Information System (IFMIS).

    The allegations paint a picture of what some officials describe as a “parallel government” operating outside constitutionally established structures.

    The Battle for IFMIS

    The most explosive allegations concern control of IFMIS, the digital platform through which government entities process payments, manage budgets and monitor expenditure.

    County officials claim that key financial decisions increasingly require informal approval before payments are processed. Sources allege that access to critical financial systems has been concentrated around a small circle of individuals loyal to the governor’s inner circle, effectively determining which contractors, suppliers and service providers get paid and when.

    Several officials interviewed for this story alleged that resistance to the arrangement has contributed to friction within the county’s finance department and may explain the departure of some senior officers over the last two years.

    If proven, such actions would raise serious questions about compliance with the Public Finance Management Act, procurement laws and constitutional principles governing public administration.

    A Government Run From Motonto?

    Perhaps the most troubling claims involve allegations that major county decisions are being discussed and sometimes made at the governor’s private residence in Motonto rather than from official county offices.

    Senior officials allege that chief officers and executive members are occasionally summoned to meetings at the residence where sensitive discussions involving budgets, pending bills and personnel matters take place.

    These allegations have drawn attention because Governor Arati’s administration has frequently portrayed itself as a champion of transparency and accountability. The governor has previously spoken publicly about rooting out corruption and removing officials accused of wrongdoing.

    Critics now argue that if county business is indeed being conducted outside formal structures, it would represent a fundamental breakdown of public accountability mechanisms.

    Climate of Fear Inside County Hall

    Interviews with county insiders reveal allegations of intimidation, public humiliation and growing fear among senior officials.

    Some sources claim that officers who challenge directives or question financial decisions risk isolation, transfers or removal from influential positions.

    Others allege that several county officials have chosen to leave government service altogether rather than continue operating in what they describe as an increasingly hostile environment.

    While many of these claims remain difficult to independently verify, the consistency of accounts from multiple sources points to deep internal tensions within the county administration.

    The allegations have gained renewed attention following reports involving senior county officers who allegedly found themselves at odds with individuals perceived to wield influence outside formal government structures.

    The Rise of Kwamboka

    The allegations are particularly striking given Mei Arati’s popularity among sections of the Kisii community.

    Her journey from China to the heart of Kisii politics has become part of local folklore. Residents affectionately call her Kwamboka, a name she earned through her command of Ekegusii and willingness to embrace local customs. She has attended church functions, community gatherings and political meetings, often attracting attention for her ability to connect with residents in their native language.

    Political observers say her visibility has helped soften tensions in a county often marked by intense political rivalry. Yet that same visibility has also fueled speculation about the extent of her influence within government circles.

    The debate raises broader questions that have confronted county governments across Kenya since devolution began: where should the line be drawn between a governor’s family members and the official machinery of government?

    Development Questions Persist

    The controversy comes at a time when Kisii County continues to face pressure over development delivery.

    The county government has highlighted major investments in roads, healthcare facilities, water projects and other infrastructure programmes under Governor Arati’s administration. Official county records point to ambitious flagship projects, including a new county headquarters complex, a mother and child hospital and an industrial park.

    At the same time, sections of the county assembly and political opponents have repeatedly questioned the pace and visibility of some development projects, creating an environment of persistent political contestation.

    The result is a county government facing scrutiny from both inside and outside its ranks.

    Calls for Investigation

    As the allegations continue to circulate, pressure is mounting for independent oversight bodies to intervene.

    County officials who spoke to this publication say the Ethics and Anti-Corruption Commission, the Auditor-General, the Controller of Budget and the Senate should examine the claims and establish whether unauthorized individuals have exercised influence over public financial systems and county operations.

    At stake is more than political reputation.

    The allegations touch on fundamental questions of public accountability, financial transparency and the integrity of devolved governance.

    For many residents, the issue has become increasingly simple: who is making decisions on the use of billions of shillings allocated annually to Kisii County?

    Is authority resting with elected and legally appointed public officers, or has power migrated to an informal centre beyond public scrutiny?

    Those questions remain unanswered.

    Neither Mei Arati nor Governor Simba Arati had publicly issued detailed responses to the specific allegations referenced in this report at the time of publication. The claims remain allegations and have not been tested in court.

    What is beyond dispute, however, is that the controversy has exposed growing unease within sections of the Kisii County administration and intensified calls for a thorough and independent examination of how power is exercised inside one of Kenya’s most politically significant counties.

  • Al-Shabaab Issues Statement Defending Omar Artan, Accuses U.S. of Discrimination After Referee’s Deportation

    Al-Shabaab Issues Statement Defending Omar Artan, Accuses U.S. of Discrimination After Referee’s Deportation

    MOGADISHU, June 11, 2026 — The controversy surrounding Somali referee Omar Artan’s deportation from the United States has taken a dramatic new turn after the militant group Al-Shabaab issued a statement defending the official and accusing Washington of hostility toward Somalis.

    In a propaganda release circulated on Wednesday, the group seized on the growing international debate over Artan’s treatment, claiming the decision to deny him entry to the United States reflected broader discrimination against Somali citizens. The statement accused the U.S. government of pursuing policies that undermine Somalia and its people, while portraying Artan’s case as evidence of what it described as ethnic prejudice rather than legitimate security concerns.

    The intervention by Al-Shabaab comes as criticism and support continue to pour in from political leaders, football officials and members of the Somali public following Artan’s deportation days before he was expected to participate in activities linked to the FIFA World Cup.

    The United States has defended its decision. Andrew Giuliani, Executive Director of the White House Task Force on the FIFA World Cup, said American authorities acted on security grounds and would not compromise national safety.

    “There are some things we cannot talk about, but one thing is for sure: anybody communicating with bad actors to plan harm against the US is not going to be granted entry,” Giuliani said in an interview with Sky News.

    He added that U.S. authorities had concerns arising from the vetting process and suggested investigators had examined possible links between Artan and individuals associated with extremist networks. No public evidence has been released linking the referee to any terrorist activity, and Somali officials have strongly rejected any suggestion that he posed a security threat.

    The case has triggered a diplomatic and political storm in Somalia, where Artan returned to a hero’s welcome after being sent back from the United States.

    Omar Artan.

    Former Somali President Mohamed Abdullahi Farmaajo described the incident as a reflection of deeper governance challenges facing the country.

    “The circumstances surrounding this event remind the Somali people that whatever goes wrong in governance and politics has a direct impact on the structure of our nation and our valuable individuals,” Farmaajo said.

    Somali Prime Minister Hamza Abdi Barre also rallied behind the referee, saying the setback would not define his career.

    “I told our Somali referee Omar Artan that while his World Cup officiating dream may have been delayed, it has never been diminished. Long before a ball is kicked, he has already won the hearts of millions and secured his place in history,” Barre said.

    The Somali Football Federation likewise defended Artan, describing him as a respected international referee who has represented Somalia with integrity on the global stage.

    Security analysts say Al-Shabaab’s decision to publicly champion Artan is likely an attempt to exploit a highly emotional issue for propaganda purposes and position itself as a defender of Somali interests. The group has frequently sought to capitalize on political grievances and disputes involving foreign governments to strengthen its narrative among sections of the population.

    While the militant organization’s statement has added another layer of controversy to an already sensitive case, Somali officials have largely focused on defending Artan’s reputation and demanding greater transparency from U.S. authorities regarding the reasons behind his deportation.

    For now, the Omar Artan saga has evolved from a sporting controversy into a wider geopolitical dispute touching on immigration policy, counterterrorism, national identity and Somalia’s relationship with the United States. With Washington standing by its decision and Somali leaders continuing to demand answers, the debate shows little sign of fading.

  • Netanyahu To Run For Re-Election, His Party Says, After Trump Raises Doubts

    Netanyahu To Run For Re-Election, His Party Says, After Trump Raises Doubts

    TEL AVIV, June 10 (Reuters) – Benjamin Netanyahu will seek re-election this year, his party announced on Wednesday, after U.S. President Donald Trump said ​he wasn’t sure if the Israeli prime minister would stand again.

    In a brief statement, ‌Netanyahu’s Likud Party said he would run in the election and, God willing, he would win. The election has not yet been formally announced but must be held by October.

    Earlier, ABC ​News Chief Washington Correspondent Jonathan Karl posted on X that Trump had ​told him he did not know if Netanyahu would stand.

    “I don’t ⁠know, he’s had an amazing career. Does he want to continue?” the journalist ​quoted Trump as saying.

    The Israeli election will be the first since the October 7, ​2023 Hamas attack, the country’s worst security failure, which precipitated Israel’s assault on the Gaza Strip.

    Netanyahu has faced a tumultuous term since returning to power in December 2022 at the helm of ​the most right-wing coalition in Israeli history. He faced mass anti-government protests before ​the wars in Gaza, Lebanon and Iran.

    Polls have repeatedly indicated that his coalition would fail to ‌win ⁠a majority at the next election. A poll published by the Jerusalem-based Israel Democracy Institute think tank on June 9 said that 61% of the Israeli public believe he should not run.

    However, polls also show that a potential coalition of opposition ​parties would fall short ​of a parliamentary ⁠majority unless they form a coalition with Arab parties, which some opposition leaders have ruled out.

    U.S. and Israeli officials say Trump ​and Netanyahu, who launched the Iran war together in February, ​still have ⁠a close relationship, though it has at times seen strain, including in recent weeks as Trump has demanded Israel curb military action in Lebanon while Washington negotiates a peace deal with Tehran.

    Last ⁠week, ​Trump acknowledged calling Netanyahu “fucking crazy” in a hot-tempered phone call, ​though he also said they get along well. He has repeatedly called on Israel’s president to pardon ​Netanyahu over outstanding corruption charges that Netanyahu denies.

  • US Cracks Down on Birth Tourism Schemes

    US Cracks Down on Birth Tourism Schemes

    The United States has begun cracking down on what it describes as “illegal birth tourism schemes” involving foreign nationals who use visitor visas to travel to the U.S. to give birth and secure citizenship for their children.

    The U.S. Department of State said in a statement posted on X on Wednesday that the Trump administration is working to “defend the integrity of U.S. citizenship” by ending such practices.

    “No foreigner is permitted to obtain a visitor visa for the primary purpose of acquiring U.S. citizenship for a child by giving birth in the U.S.,” it said.

    “A U.S. visa is a privilege, not a right. The State Department is taking action around the world to stop this abuse, dismantle birth tourism networks, and hold accountable those who try to exploit our system.”

    The department said a U.S. embassy in West Africa uncovered a “sophisticated birth tourism network” involving more than 100 foreign nationals allegedly using fraudulent documents and visa “fixers” to obtain U.S. visas for the purpose of securing citizenship for their children.

    “We shut it down, revoked these foreign nationals’ visas, and are coordinating with local authorities to systematically identify and disrupt similar operations,” it added.

    The State Department also said a U.S. embassy has identified more than 400 suspected birth tourism cases since 2024, linking them to at least six companies accused of coaching applicants on visa interview responses, arranging accommodation in the U.S., and organising delivery plans.

    It further stated that a U.S. embassy in North Africa revoked more than 100 visas belonging to alleged “birth tourism” parents who travelled to the U.S. primarily to give birth so their children could acquire citizenship.

    The department said consular officers, working with law enforcement and using data analytics, have identified and disrupted networks exploiting the visa system.

  • Microsoft Limits Employee Use Of Anthropic’s Claude Fable 5 Over Data Retention Concerns, The Verge Reports

    Microsoft Limits Employee Use Of Anthropic’s Claude Fable 5 Over Data Retention Concerns, The Verge Reports

    June 10 (Reuters) – Microsoft is limiting employees’ use of Anthropic’s Claude Fable 5 because of the AI startup’s new data retention requirements, ​The Verge reported on Wednesday, citing sources.

    Anthropic on ‌Tuesday said it is rolling out Claude Fable 5, a public version of its Mythos AI model, with guardrails barring its use in risky areas ​such as cybersecurity.

    Claude Fable 5 is the most ​powerful model Anthropic has made available for wider use, ⁠with the company citing its performance in software engineering ​and analytics.

    Microsoft has told employees that its legal teams are ​evaluating changes to Anthropic’s data retention requirements, according to the report.

    The concerns center on customer data and confidential information, and it is not ​yet clear whether Microsoft’s legal teams will clear Claude ​Fable 5 for internal use, the report said.

    Under Anthropic’s data retention policy ‌for ⁠Mythos-class models, prompts submitted and outputs generated are retained for 30 days for trust and safety purposes on every platform where the models are offered.

    Anthropic retains inputs and outputs for ​up to ​two years if ⁠they are flagged by its trust and safety classifiers as violating its usage policy.

    Microsoft and ​Anthropic did not immediately respond to Reuters requests ​for comment.

    Anthropic ⁠last week said it had confidentially filed for a U.S. initial public offering but did not disclose the size or terms of ⁠the ​offering.

    It last raised $65 billion at a ​post-money valuation of $965 billion in late May, putting it ahead of rival OpenAI.

  • Standard Chartered Ghosts Haunt Joshua Oigara At Stanbic As Whistleblower Spills Beans

    Standard Chartered Ghosts Haunt Joshua Oigara At Stanbic As Whistleblower Spills Beans

    Joshua Oigara has spent his entire adult life building an imperial career. He started at PricewaterhouseCoopers, moved through Bidco Africa and Bamburi Cement, and in January 2013 became the youngest chief executive of a Nairobi Securities Exchange-listed bank when KCB Group handed him the top job at age 37.

    He served KCB for nine and a half years, chaired the Kenya Bankers Association from 2018 to 2021, advised on the Vision 2030 Delivery Board, served on the WRC Safari Rally steering committee, and received the Chief of the Order of the Burning Spear from former President Uhuru Kenyatta.

    He was the Financial Times’ pick for one of Africa’s top 25 leaders to watch.

    By December 2022 he was CEO of Stanbic Bank Kenya. By September 2025 he was Regional Chief Executive for East Africa across six countries. By March 2026 he was CEO and Director of Stanbic Holdings Plc, the listed holding company, sitting at the apex of Africa’s largest bank by assets. The ascent has been, by any conventional measure, extraordinary.

    It is also, according to a growing body of documented evidence and sworn allegations before Kenyan courts, an ascent that has been made possible by the systematic failure of regulators to ask, and answer, a single consequential question: what exactly was Joshua Oigara doing between 2018 and 2021, when he ran Standard Chartered Bank Kenya, and what did he know about the alleged fraud that a former procurement officer named David Dimba says was happening on his watch?

    THE STANDARD CHARTERED YEARS: THE PERIOD IN QUESTION

    Oigara arrived at Standard Chartered Kenya as CEO in 2018, at precisely the moment Dimba says the rot was deepening. His role was unambiguous. As the Country Chief Executive, Oigara chaired the monthly Country Management Committee, the senior forum where every major vendor contract, procurement overrun and financial decision of consequence was reviewed. He was, in Dimba’s documented account, the most senior person in the building.

    Dimba joined the bank in 2011 and rose to sourcing manager, a position with direct sight lines into the bank’s largest spending decisions.

    By 2019, he was flagging what he believed was a systemic scheme to extract money through inflated vendor contracts.

    A cleaning firm called Tafika Cleaners Limited, he alleges, held a contract worth approximately 36 million shillings that had grown without competitive bidding to over 127 million shillings by 2020. A set of IT vendors sharing the same IP address and postal box, he claims, were paid a combined 410 million shillings for network optimisation work that was never implemented.

    Senior managers were, he alleges, coding personal shopping trips in Dubai and Johannesburg as client entertainment through the bank’s Concur expense system, with the total running to approximately 23 million shillings.

    And a politically connected client was, he claims, allowed to move roughly four million US dollars through shell entities without proper Know Your Customer checks, a transaction he says he flagged in 2019 and was told not to pursue.

    The idea that a CEO who chaired the Country Management Committee every month for three years did not know what was happening in his own procurement division is, in Dimba’s word, laughable.

    Dimba went through every available internal channel: the Country Head of Compliance, the Regional Head of Investigations in Dubai, the global whistleblower hotline.

    He was suspended in June 2020 and dismissed in February 2022. Oigara had left Standard Chartered in late 2021. Within 13 months of his departure, he was installed as CEO at Stanbic Bank Kenya. The man who allegedly presided over the worst period of institutional corruption in the bank’s recent history had moved, without a single regulatory review or public accounting, to a rival’s top seat.

    THE KCB INHERITANCE: A CLEANUP THAT WASN’T HIS PROBLEM

    Before Standard Chartered, Oigara ran KCB Group for nine and a half years. The growth figures are real and are widely cited: profit before tax more than doubled from 20.1 billion shillings in 2013 to 47 billion shillings in 2021. Total assets crossed one trillion shillings.

    KCB-Mpesa, the mobile lending platform built in collaboration with Safaricom, put the bank at the centre of Kenya’s fintech revolution.

    What is less cited, but equally documented, is what the expansion left behind. By the time Oigara stepped down in May 2022, seven months before his contract was due to expire, KCB’s non-performing loan ratio stood at 16.5 percent, already elevated, and climbing.

    His successor Paul Russo inherited a book whose problems the incoming CEO described publicly as legacy NPLs and legal claims requiring deep surgery.

    Russo’s team wrote off 10 billion shillings in loans, set aside 2.3 billion for legal claims, spent 1.5 billion on a voluntary staff exit programme, and built a dedicated special loans recovery unit to manage assets that had been under stress for years.

    By June 2023, KCB Kenya’s NPL ratio had reached 19.6 percent, and the Boardlot Sultan market analysis published on 10 June 2026 confirms the peak reached approximately 19.2 percent in 2024 before the cleanup began to take effect.

    One bank analyst, writing in that period, used a phrase that has circulated widely in Kenya’s banking community since: the CEO who climbs the mountain often leaves the cleanup for those who follow.

    Companies placed into receivership or administration by KCB to recover Oigara-era debts read like a cross-section of Kenya’s industrial economy.

    East Africa Portland Cement surrendered approximately 2,000 acres of land in Mavoko against a 6.8 billion shilling debt. Savannah Cement, Proctor and Allan, Diamond Industries, Elson Plastics and Korara Highlands Tea were all placed under administration or receivership in 2024 and 2025, with combined exposures running into billions of shillings.

    The asset recovery operation that followed Oigara’s exit has been one of the largest and most aggressive in Kenyan corporate history.

    STANBIC: A NEW BANK, OLD TROUBLES

    The legal trouble at Stanbic did not take long to find Oigara. By October 2024, the Banking Fraud Investigations Unit had summoned him to its Kiambu Road headquarters to record a statement about an eight-year dispute between Stanbic and Air Afrik Aviation Limited, a Kenyan airline that had operated an account at the bank’s Juba branch in South Sudan.

    The dispute concerned 7.22 million US dollars, approximately 932 million shillings, that the Bank of South Sudan credited to Air Afrik’s account in February 2016 for a leasing agreement with the South Sudanese government.

    Stanbic reversed the credit and Air Afrik accused the bank of fraudulent false accounting and illegally freezing and withdrawing money from its account.

    The DCI’s investigators informed Oigara’s lawyers they were probing the bank for unsafe and unsound banking practices including fraudulent false accounting. Oigara rushed to the High Court. His lawyers argued, with some justification, that the disputed transactions occurred before he joined Stanbic and that the DCI was improperly interfering in an active civil suit already pending before Justice Nixon Sifuna in the commercial division.

    In November 2024, Justice Bahati Mwamuye granted a conservatory order barring the Banking Fraud Investigations Unit from questioning Oigara or any Stanbic employees, and restraining the Director of Public Prosecutions from filing criminal charges until the petition was fully determined.

    The order shielded Oigara from the investigators, but it did not end the affair.

    In December 2024, South Sudan’s Public Prosecution Attorney issued a separate summons requiring Oigara to appear in Juba by December 19 to answer or defend himself for offences under section 110 of the South Sudan Penal Code.

    The South Sudan police separately issued an international arrest warrant against Fredrick Owuor Ouko, Stanbic’s South Sudan country head, over the same dispute. Two jurisdictions, one banking executive, one deepening spiral.

    The High Court order did not make Oigara innocent. It made him unreachable. That is a different thing.

    THE DIMBA PETITION AND THE FIT-AND-PROPER TEST

    Into this environment, Dimba filed his Citizen’s Petition to the Central Bank of Kenya in early June 2026. Among his demands is a specific one that cuts directly to Oigara’s current position: a review by the Central Bank of Kenya of Oigara’s suitability under the fit and proper person framework that governs who may hold directorships in regulated financial institutions.

    Under the Banking Act and CBK’s own prudential guidelines, a person seeking or holding a senior position at a licensed institution must demonstrate, among other things, integrity and the absence of pending criminal investigations or serious allegations of financial misconduct.

    Dimba’s argument is straightforward: a man who chaired the Country Management Committee during the period when 410 million shillings in allegedly fictitious IT payments were made, and who left without ever being investigated, should not be allowed to accumulate executive authority across six East African countries without the regulator first answering what he knew.

    The Central Bank has not responded publicly to the petition. It has not confirmed or denied whether a fit and proper review of Oigara has been initiated.

    The Banking Fraud Investigations Unit, which Dimba had previously been referred to by a parliamentary committee, has not forwarded a file to the Director of Public Prosecutions in relation to the Standard Chartered allegations.

    As of June 2026, no charges have been filed, no bar imposed, and no investigation publicly confirmed.

    THE ARCHITECTURE OF IMPUNITY

    What makes Oigara’s trajectory uniquely disturbing is not any single allegation but the cumulative pattern.

    At KCB, he departed seven months early with the NPL book at 16.5 percent and climbing, leaving a cleanup that cost his successors tens of billions of shillings and years of painful restructuring.

    At Standard Chartered Kenya, where he served as CEO from 2018 to 2021, a former insider has filed sworn court papers alleging that 410 million shillings in fraudulent IT payments were made, that a cleaning contract grew by 250 percent through fictitious variation orders, and that a politically connected money laundering suspect was explicitly described to Dimba as untouchable.

    At Stanbic, the DCI has attempted to question him in relation to alleged fraudulent false accounting, and South Sudan’s criminal justice system is actively pursuing the matter across an international border.

    At each institution, Oigara has survived.

    The mechanism is always the same: powerful board support, expensive legal representation, regulatory paralysis, and the kind of social capital that comes from three decades of building alliances at the top of Kenya’s corporate pyramid.

    The Boardlot Sultan profile published on 10 June 2026 calls him a Strategic Institutionalist.

    The less flattering but equally accurate description is a man who has consistently managed to position himself above the consequences of institutional failure while the junior staff, the pensioners, and the whistleblowers absorb the damage below.

    Kenya placed on the FATF grey list in February 2024 precisely because the global anti-money laundering watchdog found that the country could not demonstrate a single successful investigation and prosecution of a money laundering offence.

    The Financial Reporting Centre, which briefly opened an inquiry into the Standard Chartered money laundering allegation in 2023, made no public findings.

    The Banking Fraud Investigations Unit, as a parliamentary report noted, failed to interview key witnesses in the Dimba complaint.

    The DCI, which attempted to question Oigara about Stanbic’s Air Afrik dispute, was blocked by a High Court conservatory order obtained within weeks of the summons being issued. The pattern is not coincidental. It is a system.

    WHAT THE RECORD SAYS

    Every morning before seven, David Dimba posts to his 120,000 LinkedIn followers. His pinned tagline has not changed. A bank’s real capital is trust. You stole mine. Now I’m taking it back. The line was written with Standard Chartered in mind, but it applies equally to the entire institutional ecosystem that has allowed Joshua Oigara to move from KCB to Standard Chartered Kenya to Stanbic Holdings Plc to Regional Chief Executive for East Africa at Africa’s largest bank without ever once being required to answer, in a criminal court or before the Central Bank, what he knew and when he knew it.

    Every month that passes without a credible, independent answer is a month in which the most senior banking executive operating in East Africa carries unresolved allegations from three institutions across three legal jurisdictions. That is not a clean record. It is a deferred reckoning.

  • ‪Caleb Amisi Says Linda Mwananchi Has Lost Direction, Announces Plans To Form A New Movement

    ‪Caleb Amisi Says Linda Mwananchi Has Lost Direction, Announces Plans To Form A New Movement

    Saboti Member of Parliament Caleb Amisi has announced plans to form a new movement separate from Linda Mwananchi, saying that it has deviated from its original course.

    Speaking during an interview with a local media station on Wednesday, June 10, 2026, the outspoken MP, who is an integral member of Linda Mwananchi, also stated that the movement will aim to bring credible people to Parliament in the next general election who are focused on changing society.

    “The Linda Mwananchi did not understand its initial assignment, and it has deviated from its original course, and that is why I want to form a new movement that will continue with the struggle,” Amisi said.

    He went on to state that Linda Mwananchi, which was created as a quality alternative for young people seeking an overhaul in the governance sector, has begun conforming to the status quo and has veered off the path it was supposed to navigate. He went on to state that he has a team of think tanks who have already begun drafting the issues and agenda that the movement will pursue.

    A section of Linda Mwananchi leaders during the Linda Mwananchi engagements in Vihiga.

    Amisi further added that the movement will be a renaissance movement or people’s movement but will be different from the People’s Renaissance Movement (PRM) that has been widely associated with him. He insisted that this is a movement and not a party, which, according to him, will ensure that a new crop of leaders are elected into Parliament who are credible and can even impeach a president whenever he goes wrong, something he argued the current Parliament cannot attempt.

    The movement’s goal

    According to Amisi, the plans to remove President William Ruto from power in 2027 through the ballot failed. He argued that the movement, which is concentrating on ensuring credible people are elected to Parliament, would then be in a position to succeed in that mission and remove him immediately through impeachment after he is elected into office.

    “We are starting a renaissance movement, what we call the people’s movement. The purpose of this movement is to ensure a new crop of leaders is elected. The goal of the movement is that I want new people in parliament who are credible, who even when a president goes wrong,” he added.

    Amisi went ahead to state that he was the brain behind Linda Mwananchi and even selected Edwin Sifuna to be its leader. He contended that were it not for him, after Sifuna’s ouster from ODM party leadership, he would not have had a landing site and would have been roaming around without any portfolio or the crowd hype he has been receiving recently.

    However, he insisted that he formed the vehicle and that Sifuna’s removal from ODM only catapulted his popularity.

    This comes at a time when Caleb Amisi appears dissatisfied with the direction that Linda Mwananchi is taking. He has also rejected their calls to get into a partnership with the United Opposition, maintaining that the movement should remain independent and focused on its original objectives.

    He further intimated that since they have deviated from the original plan, the course must continue, and that is why, according to him, he has decided to form a separate movement to champion the cause.

  • Air Canada Pilot Flew Passengers For Years With A Fake Pilot’s License, Police Say

    Air Canada Pilot Flew Passengers For Years With A Fake Pilot’s License, Police Say

    A former Air Canada pilot faces criminal charges for flying tens of thousands of passengers for nearly 17 years with a fake pilot’s license, Canadian police announced Tuesday.

    Geoffrey Wall was arrested June 1 after investigators say he captained over 900 domestic and international flights from 2009 to 2025, without ever obtaining the proper license or completing the mandatory testing.

    “This investigation and the details surrounding it read like a movie script,” Peel Regional Police Deputy Chief Milinovich said in a news conference in Ontario. “(Wall) rose to the position of pilot in command where for almost 17 years they flew Boeing 767s, 777, and 787s,” while earning nearly $3 million Canadian dollars (more than $2 million US dollars) salary.

    The allegations echo the 2002 film “Catch Me If You Can,” where a teenager talks his way into flying for PanAm.

    In this case, Wall was licensed to fly commercial planes for his entire 27 year career with Air Canada, but police say he never possessed an Airline Transport Pilot License for Aeroplanes, also known as an ATPL-A, which was required when he was promoted to captain in 2009.

    “This is very similar to a doctor that is licensed to practice family medicine but is doing brain surgery in their office,” Milinovich said. “There’s additional requirements and regulations to professional designations that exist for a reason.”

    “We believe the accused misrepresented his qualifications to both his employer and the regulator,” Milinovich said.

    Wall was caught after a routine examination of his credentials in 2025 revealed “anomalies… within the pilot license documentation,” and Air Canada notified regulators, the investigators said.

    He retired in 2025 before the regulatory and criminal investigation, dubbed “Project Icarus,” was launched in January.

    CNN was unable to immediately locate an attorney representing Wall.

    The airline noted Wall was a licensed commercial pilot and regularly showed he was capable of safely flying large planes.

    “Safety was not compromised by this incident because all pilots at Air Canada undergo mandatory recurrent training every six months to validate their flying competency, including a flight check with a certified Transport Canada check-pilot every 12 months,” Air Canada said in a statement posted on Monday.

    “However, appropriate licensing is an essential layer of the airline industry’s multi-layered approach to safety, so Air Canada takes this matter with utmost seriousness,” the airline went on to say.

    Wall was fined by Transport Canada and faces seven criminal charges, including fraud over $5,000, two counts of uttering forged documents, and three counts of possession of a counterfeit mark, police said. He is expected to appear in court on June 29, 2026.

    –CNN

  • Itumbi Claims Kalonzo Has Settled on Sifuna as Running Mate

    Itumbi Claims Kalonzo Has Settled on Sifuna as Running Mate

    NAIROBI, June 10, 2026 — President William Ruto’s digital strategist Dennis Itumbi has sparked fresh political debate after claiming that Wiper leader Kalonzo Musyoka has settled on Nairobi Senator Edwin Sifuna as his preferred running mate for the 2027 General Election.

    In a lengthy open letter circulated on social media and addressed to a figure he referred to as “Jofri”, a name widely interpreted in political circles as a reference to former Deputy President Rigathi Gachagua, Itumbi laid out what he described as the opposition’s emerging political strategy ahead of the next election.

    According to Itumbi, Kalonzo and Sifuna are expected to lead a coalition under the banner of the Ukombozi Linda Mwananchi Alliance, bringing together Kalonzo’s Komboa Kenya campaign and Sifuna’s Linda Mwananchi movement.

    The strategist further alleged that the opposition has already identified key candidates for Nairobi’s top elective seats.

    He claimed Embakasi East MP Babu Owino has been earmarked for the Nairobi governor race, while former Public Service Cabinet Secretary Irungu Nyakera is being considered for the Senate seat.

    In a pointed attack on Gachagua, Itumbi claimed the opposition leadership had rejected advice allegedly advocating for a Kikuyu candidate in the Nairobi governor contest, suggesting growing tensions over the direction of opposition politics and the role of the Mount Kenya region within the coalition.

    The most serious allegations in Itumbi’s statement concerned the planned protests scheduled for June 24 and June 25, as well as the anticipated Saba Saba demonstrations.

    Without providing evidence, Itumbi accused Gachagua of being the architect of the planned protests and claimed the former deputy president follows a recurring pattern of distancing himself from events when demonstrations turn chaotic.

    The allegations are likely to intensify an already heated political environment as opposition leaders continue to mobilise supporters against the Kenya Kwanza administration.

    Neither Kalonzo, Sifuna nor Gachagua had publicly responded to Itumbi’s claims by Wednesday evening.

    The remarks come at a time of heightened political activity within opposition ranks. Kalonzo recently intensified his Komboa Kenya campaign, signalling his intention to mount another presidential bid, while Sifuna and allies associated with the Linda Mwananchi movement have been conducting political rallies across several regions.

    Political observers view Itumbi’s intervention as part of the increasingly aggressive battle for narrative control ahead of 2027.

    While some interpret the claims as an attempt to expose and potentially destabilise opposition plans, others argue the level of detail contained in the statement suggests deep knowledge of ongoing discussions within rival political camps.

    The claims also place fresh pressure on Gachagua, who has been seeking to consolidate support following his fallout with President Ruto and subsequent impeachment battles.

    Whether Itumbi’s assertions reflect genuine political realignments or form part of a broader contest for public opinion remains unclear. What is certain is that the statement has injected fresh intrigue into an opposition landscape that is still taking shape more than a year before the next General Election.

  • THE KURIA NETWORK TAKES THE BOARDROOM: How Moses Kuria’s Inner Circle Seized Control of Africa Mega Agricorp And the Paper Trail That Links It All

    THE KURIA NETWORK TAKES THE BOARDROOM: How Moses Kuria’s Inner Circle Seized Control of Africa Mega Agricorp And the Paper Trail That Links It All

    On the morning of June 3, 2026, two men who spent years fetching briefcases and drafting memos for one of Kenya’s most colourful politicians took their seats at the top of a publicly listed company.

    Joshua Gakinya, once the personal assistant to former Cabinet Secretary Moses Kuria, was appointed Independent Non-Executive Director of Africa Mega Agricorp PLC.

    Phillip Ndabari Muriuki, who served as Kuria’s senior adviser when he ran the Ministry of Public Service, Performance and Delivery Management, was installed as the company’s new Chairman.

    Their ascent to the board of a Nairobi Securities Exchange-listed firm would be unremarkable if not for what preceded it: a corporate acquisition that critics argue was orchestrated from within government, a UAE-registered firm that shares a postal address with Kuria himself, and a pattern of state contracts flowing to entities within the same web of relationships. The appointments complete a circle that has been drawing slowly tighter since 2023.

    The two men who once carried Kuria’s briefcases now carry the chairmanship and a directorship at a KSh 1.4 billion agribusiness empire.

    FROM KENYA ORCHARDS TO AMAC: THE ARCHITECTURE OF A TAKEOVER

    Africa Mega Agricorp PLC traded on the NSE under the ticker AMAC did not always wear its current ambitions. For decades it was known as Kenya Orchards Limited, a modest Nakuru-based processor of fruit jams, tomato paste, canned beans, and condiments that had quietly lost its competitive edge. By 2024, its share price hovered around KSh 19.50, and the company’s future was the subject of a cautionary statement rather than investor enthusiasm.

    That changed in June 2024 when Kenya Orchards issued a statement to the exchange disclosing that it had received a bid from a company called Africa Mega Agriculture Centre Limited to acquire an 84.42 per cent controlling stake. The purchase price, calculated on prevailing share values, was estimated at KSh 210 million.

    The sellers were Westpac Holdings Limited, which held 34.28 per cent, alongside three individual shareholders: Thakarshi Keshav Patel at 33.61 per cent, his son Vipul Thakarshi Patel at 14.89 per cent, and Hansa Dinesh Chandra Shah at 1.65 per cent. The transaction was conducted as a private sale and involved asset transfers to settle outstanding dues owed by the company to its outgoing shareholders.

    Shareholder approval was secured at an extraordinary general meeting in August 2024.

    A certificate of change of name was issued by the Registrar of Companies on December 16, 2024, and by early 2025, Kenya Orchards had formally disappeared from the exchange, replaced by Africa Mega Agricorp PLC.

    Today the company trades at around KSh 111 to KSh 115 per share, giving it a market capitalisation approaching KSh 1.43 billion a near-600 per cent appreciation from the price at which its controlling stake changed hands.

    THE INVESTAFRICA THREAD: A UAE ENTITY, A SHARED ADDRESS, A DENIED CONNECTION

    The story of who actually orchestrated the Kenya Orchards acquisition begins not at Nakuru but in Dubai. Africa Mega Agriculture Centre Limited, the vehicle that purchased the controlling stake, was incorporated on November 24, 2023, by InvestAfrica-FZCO a firm registered in the United Arab Emirates whose beneficial ownership has been the subject of sustained controversy since 2022.

    InvestAfrica-FZCO first surfaced in Kenyan public discourse in 2023 when it acquired a 35 per cent stake in Eveready East Africa from the family of the late industrialist Naushad Merali.

    That transaction, like the Kenya Orchards deal that followed, was structured as a private sale with no obligation extended to minority shareholders and no intention to delist.

    The structural similarities between the two transactions same acquirer network, same approach, same NSE disclosure template were not lost on market analysts.

    What elevated InvestAfrica-FZCO from an anonymous UAE investor to a subject of parliamentary and press scrutiny was a single detail revealed by auctioneers in March 2025: a postal address shared by InvestAfrica-FZCO and Moses Kuria himself.

    An advertisement published by Garam Investments Limited in connection with the intended auction of Kuria’s properties at Juja and Ruaka disclosed the shared address, setting off a chain of corporate archaeology.

    The trail did not end there. InvestAfrica-FZCO is listed as the sole beneficial owner of Emerging Capital Holdings, which in turn owns Smith and Gold Productions Limited. Smith and Gold was, until 2023, listed in corporate filings with Kuria himself as beneficial owner.

    When ownership of Smith and Gold shifted to InvestAfrica-FZCO, Kuria’s brother Alois Kinyanjui remained a stakeholder in the firm. Smith and Gold had previously won a KSh 259 million contract for the construction of Karatu Stadium in Kiambu County work that a parliamentary report in 2020 found had not been completed to the value of the funds disbursed, with KSh 102 million released despite inadequate delivery.

    Until 2023, Kuria was named as Smith and Gold’s beneficial owner. Ownership then shifted to InvestAfrica-FZCO. His brother remained inside the structure.

    THE EDIBLE OILS SCANDAL: STATE POWER, DUBAI SUBSIDIARIES, AND QUESTIONABLE CONTRACTS

    The edible oils episode provides the most documented intersection between Moses Kuria’s tenure as a Cabinet Secretary and the entities that orbit InvestAfrica-FZCO.

    When Kuria served as Cabinet Secretary for Trade and Industrialisation before his subsequent move to the Public Service ministry his ministry oversaw a government programme to import 125,000 metric tonnes of cooking oil through the Kenya National Trading Corporation to address rising consumer prices.

    Among the companies awarded local purchase orders under that programme was Shehena Trading Commodity Limited, a wholly-owned subsidiary of InvestAfrica-FZCO.

    Shehena secured a KSh 1.33 billion contract to supply edible oils to KNTC. Investigators and parliamentary inquiries later confirmed that Wilfred Saroni, listed as CEO of the InvestAfrica-FZCO enterprise, was described in official documents as closely associated with the then Trade CS.

    The same audits revealed that KNTC did not pay customs duty of 35 per cent, import declaration fees of 3.5 per cent, or agricultural levies totalling 2 per cent on the consignments a combined tax exemption of 42.5 per cent that investigators calculated would generate a liability of nearly KSh 10 billion against the full programme.

    The Kenya Bureau of Standards subsequently confirmed in a letter dated September 5, 2023, that the 125,000 metric tonnes of cooking oil imported was unfit for human consumption.

    Kuria denied personal wrongdoing throughout, and has consistently maintained that he has no ownership of InvestAfrica-FZCO.

    The Directorate of Criminal Investigations was among agencies that sought corporate registration details for Shehena and related firms.

    THE APPOINTMENTS: NDABARI, GAKINYA, AND THE COMPLETION OF A CIRCLE

    Effective June 3, 2026, Africa Mega Agricorp PLC made four simultaneous announcements: Phillip Ndabari Muriuki was appointed Chairman and Independent Non-Executive Director; James Watenga Kamau was appointed Executive Director; Joshua Gakinya was appointed Independent Non-Executive Director; and Abraham Ng’etich was named Acting Chief Executive Officer. The outgoing directors, Yebeltal Getachew and Michael Foley, resigned simultaneously.

    Ndabari, the new Chairman, brings a professional biography that spans commercial banking, payment systems, and board oversight across Africa, the Middle East, and the Gulf Cooperation Council region — a career arc that mirrors Kuria’s own early trajectory through Standard Chartered and Al Rajhi Bank in Saudi Arabia. His appointment as the independent chair of a company controlled by an entity linked to Kuria raises questions the Capital Markets Authority has tools to examine.

    Gakinya, the new non-executive director, operated as Kuria’s personal assistant during his ministerial career. His professional profile references entrepreneurial interests in agribusiness and technology.

    The appointment of a former personal assistant as an independent director on the board of a company whose acquisition was engineered by an entity associated with the same employer is, at minimum, an unusual governance arrangement for an NSE-listed public company.

    WESTPACK, DIGIFARM, AND THE AGRIBUSINESS AMBITION

    Before InvestAfrica-FZCO structured the Kenya Orchards deal, Kuria’s own declared business interests extended into agriculture through a company called Westpack.

    The firm signed an agreement with Safaricom’s DigiFarm platform to market green grams Ndengu grown by smallholder farmers in Kitui County, connecting them to downstream buyers through digital infrastructure.

    The arrangement collapsed before delivering material results, but it demonstrated that Kuria had, even before his ministerial appointments, identified the nexus of smallholder agriculture, digital platforms, and market access as an area of commercial interest.

    AMAC’s current positioning which it describes as a farm-to-global trade infrastructure company connecting smallholders in Kenya’s 47 counties to buyers in the Middle East, Europe, and beyond through technology and traceability mirrors precisely that thesis.

    Whether the Westpack-DigiFarm venture was a precursor to the AMAC strategy, or merely a coincidence of strategic interest, is a question that the overlap of personnel and timing invites.

    WHAT AMAC REPRESENTS: SIGNIFICANCE BEYOND THE CONTROVERSY

    It would be a disservice to the millions of Kenyan smallholders who depend on agricultural value chains to reduce this story to its political dimension alone. Africa Mega Agricorp PLC operates in a sector that accounts for a significant share of Kenya’s GDP, employs the majority of its rural population, and generates substantial foreign exchange through exports of coffee, tea, avocados, cut flowers, and horticultural produce.

    A well-governed, well-capitalised NSE-listed agribusiness with genuine reach across all 47 counties and real export infrastructure could provide price stability for farmers, reduce post-harvest losses, improve access to trade finance, and position Kenya as the dominant agro-processing hub in the East African region.

    The company’s stated ambitions cold-chain logistics, digital marketplaces, warehouse receipt financing, ESG-compliant supply chains are the kind of structural interventions that Kenya’s agricultural sector genuinely requires. The question is not whether such a company should exist. It is whether the manner in which it came to exist, and the identity of those who now govern it, can withstand the scrutiny that public markets demand.

    REGULATORY SILENCE AND THE DISCLOSURE QUESTION

    Kenya’s Capital Markets Authority requires listed companies to observe the highest standards of corporate governance, including the independence of non-executive directors and full disclosure of related-party interests.

    The CMA’s own rules on the independence of directors specifically require that an individual’s relationships with controlling shareholders be examined. The connection between AMAC’s new Chairman, its new non-executive director, and the man whose associate network acquired the controlling stake in the company is the kind of relationship that the CMA’s definitions of independence were designed to interrogate.

    NSE-listed shares are held by pension funds, retail investors, unit trusts, and insurance companies institutions entrusted with the savings of ordinary Kenyans.

    Those shareholders are entitled to know whether the persons declared to be independent directors truly are independent, and whether the company’s governance architecture protects minority shareholders or serves the interests of its controlling entities.

  • Who Is The Somali Referee Barred From Entering The US For The World Cup?

    Who Is The Somali Referee Barred From Entering The US For The World Cup?

    Refereeing at the 2026 Fifa World Cup was set to be the highlight of Omar Artan’s career, but the Somali will miss out on the opportunity to take charge of matches on the game’s biggest stage after being denied entry to the United States.

    The 34-year-old, who was set to become the first man from his country to play an on-pitch role at the finals, was turned away by border officials in Miami despite holding a diplomatic passport and a single-entry US visa.

    “Every referee’s ambition is to go to the World Cup,” Artan told BBC Somali in an interview last week before leaving home.

    “When you are selected, you feel that all your hard work was worth it. It was a moment where everything came into focus.

    “Years of effort finally made sense.”

    Artan, who was named the best male referee in Africa last year and took charge of two matches at the recent Africa Cup of Nations (Afcon), had been hailed as “a symbol of inspiration for the new generation of Somalis” by the country’s President Hassan Mohamud after being included in the list of Fifa match officials.

    The Somali government is mounting diplomatic efforts in a bid to resolve the issue, but Artan looks set to be excluded from the World Cup after rising through the officiating ranks in a country which has been troubled by conflict in recent decades.

    The US State Department told BBC Africa that it welcomes “legitimate travellers” to the World Cup and adjudicates each visa application on a case-by-case basis “after rigorous review and thorough vetting”.

    It also cited “national security and public safety” as other factors in their visa process.

    For now Artan remains in Turkey’s main city Istanbul following his removal from US soil, but it is believed he will return to Somalia’s capital Mogadishu on Wednesday.

    An important mentor

    Artan’s refereeing career began in Mogadishu on neighbourhood pitches after a leg injury ended his playing days.

    He unexpectedly first picked up a whistle during a local match when a dispute over the referee prompted players on both sides to ask him to take over. He accepted and remained in the role.

    Artan went on to officiate in organised competitions in the city, although much of his early development came while overseeing informal and semi-organised fixtures.

    A key influence in his early career was Osman Jama Dirac, the former head of referees in Somalia.

    Dirac provided technical guidance and personal support during a period when Somali football operated with limited institutional structure and little international exposure.

    “He was like a father to us,” Artan said.

    “He did not just lead referees, he took care of us. If you were in Mogadishu and had nothing, he would make sure you ate, he would take you to a restaurant.”

    However, Dirac was killed in August 2017.

    Artan has spoken of the timing with restraint.

    “It was very hard,” he said.

    “He was preparing me to become an international [referee]. He would have been proud to see a Somali reaching this level.”

    Artan refereed three matches at the 2023 Afcon, and two at the 2025 edition of the finals

    Rising through the continental game

    Artan became a Fifa-listed referee in 2018 and steadily moved through the African game, overseeing high-profile continental fixtures.

    In January 2024, he became the first Somali to referee at an Afcon game, taking charge of the Group E match between Tunisia and Namibia.

    He was recognised by Confederation of African Football (Caf) as its top male official in November, before being appointed by the continent’s governing body to oversee the second leg of the African Champions League final between Moroccan club AS FAR and South Africa’s Mamelodi Sundowns last month.

    In April, praise came from President Mohamud after Artan was named among the 52 referees for the World Cup.

    “I commend the effort, professionalism, and integrity shown by referee Omar,” Mohamud said.

    It was certainly a proud moment for Artan – and one he knew was a milestone achievement.

    “It was not just my joy,” he said.

    “My family, Somali people, the federation and young referees all shared that feeling. It became hope for them that a Somali referee can reach that level.”

    In the months leading up to the tournament, Artan described an intensive preparation routine.

    “Every morning I was on the pitch,” he explained.

    “Preparation for the World Cup is not small work… physically, mentally, and in knowledge.

    “In World Cup football you are dealing with world-class referees at the highest level. You have to reach that standard and stay there.”

    Refused entry

    Artan was part of the officiating team for the Under-20 World Cup in Chile last year, and received recognition from Fifa referees chief Pierluigi Collina (second left) after refereeing the third-place play-off

    Artan set off for the World Cup via Turkey on Saturday, intending to attend a pre-tournament seminar in Miami where Fifa referees’ chief Pierluigi Collina has created a training base for the referees and 88 assistant referees selected for the finals.

    But Somalia is one of several countries on a travel ban list introduced by US President Donald Trump’s administration, and Artan ran into difficulties on arrival in Florida.

    He told the New York Times he was questioned by immigration officials for 11 hours, with the Al-Qaeda-aligned militant group al-Shabab one of the main topics raised by border and customs officers.

    Artan was placed on a return flight after US immigration officials cited “vetting concerns”.

    All on-pitch officials at the World Cup must be based at Fifa’s Miami hub for training, preparation and security, and that requirement means it would not be possible for Artan to only be assigned to games which are being played in Canada or Mexico.

    Fifa appears powerless to intervene in the Somali’s case.

    “Fifa is not involved in host country immigration processes, including visa adjudications, and has been informed by authorities that Mr Artan’s status will not be changed at present,” the game’s world governing body said in a statement on Monday.

    “A host government ultimately determines who receives a visa and who is admitted into their country.”

    Somalia’s government says it is “deeply saddened” by the circumstances while Artan expressed gratitude to the “football family” for their messages of support.

    “I would like to thank Fifa and Caf for all their support and I promise to keep my refereeing levels up as I concentrate on the future,” he said in his own statement issued to Reuters.

    “I wish my colleagues all the best success during the World Cup and I look forward to joining them again in future competitions.”

    Africa will now be represented by six referees at the tournament, which kicks off on Thursday and runs until 19 July, with those officials coming from Algeria, Egypt, Gabon, Mauritania, Morocco and South Africa.

    But Omar Artan will not join them after a historic moment for him and Somalia was scuppered by US immigration officials.

  • Inside NCBA’s Decline: How a Banking Giant Lost Its Strategic Edge

    Inside NCBA’s Decline: How a Banking Giant Lost Its Strategic Edge

    The banking order in Kenya is shifting, and nowhere is the evidence more stark than in a single line on two balance sheets filed simultaneously with the Central Bank of Kenya. In the quarter ended March 2026, I&M Group’s total assets crossed Sh742.5 billion, overtaking NCBA Group’s Sh741.1 billion to knock the dynasty bank out of the fourth position it had occupied for years.

    The gap is narrow, barely Sh1.4 billion, but the direction of travel is not. NCBA’s balance sheet has been contracting for several consecutive reporting periods while rivals have expanded. That is not a statistical blip.

    That is a structural signal, and prudent depositors, investors and counterparties would be wise to read it carefully before their next engagement with this institution.

    NCBA has spent the past eighteen months producing press releases about profits and digital lending volumes while quietly glossing over the fact that the asset base on which those profits sit is actively declining.

    Total assets fell 5.6 percent year-on-year in the first quarter of 2025 to Sh656 billion from Sh694.9 billion. By the mid-year results, total assets had shrunk further to Sh663 billion, down 3.8 percent.

    By the third quarter they closed at Sh665 billion, still down 2 percent year-on-year. Customer deposits, the most fundamental measure of public trust in any bank, fell 9.6 percent in Q1 2025 and remained down 5.3 percent through Q3. These are not minor rounding errors on a growing franchise. They are the numbers of a bank that is losing ground.

    To understand how a lender that emerged from the 2019 merger of NIC Bank and Commercial Bank of Africa with such fanfare arrived at this moment requires examining not just the headline numbers management presents to investors, but the pattern of governance failures, internal fraud cases, regulatory sanctions, and ownership conflicts that have accumulated in plain sight.

    THE BALANCE SHEET THAT SHRANK

    The numbers that NCBA’s communications machinery does not lead with are these. At its peak following the merger, NCBA commanded a balance sheet of nearly Sh695 billion.

    By March 2026 that figure had settled at Sh741 billion, a nominal rise that masks the compound effect of inflation and the far more aggressive growth posted by every competitor in its tier.

    The loan book, which NCBA has repeatedly cited as evidence of commercial momentum, stood at Sh324.4 billion in March 2026, marginally ahead of I&M’s Sh322.9 billion.

    The previous gap had been Sh40.33 billion in December 2022. NCBA has therefore surrendered the bulk of a forty-billion-shilling loan book advantage over a single rival in less than four years, during a period when management was drawing salaries, running marketing campaigns, and issuing quarterly statements about record digital disbursements.

    -5.6%  total asset contraction, Q1 2025 year-on-year

    NCBA Group unaudited Q1 2025 results vs Q1 2024

    -6.0%  customer deposit decline at H1 2025

    NCBA Group H1 2025 press release, August 2025

    7%  profit growth, full year 2025 vs I&M’s 24.4%

    NCBA annual results vs I&M Group comparative performance

    The deposit contraction is the more troubling number. Deposits represent the votes cast daily by the market on whether a bank deserves public trust.

    When NCBA’s deposit base shrinks by nearly ten percent in a single quarter while the broader banking sector is mobilising savings, it suggests customers are actively choosing to move their money elsewhere.

    NCBA’s management has explained the contraction as the result of deliberate repricing, the decision to cut deposit rates from 11.97 percent in September 2024 to 7.3 percent in September 2025. The framing presents a strategic choice as a positive development. The market is less convinced.

    BUILT ON A MERGER THAT NEVER FULLY HEALED

    The root cause of NCBA’s current institutional fragility is a merger that was celebrated as a triumph of Kenyan capitalism but which, in operational terms, left deep scars.

    When NIC Group and Commercial Bank of Africa completed their combination on September 30, 2019, the result was a lender that ranked third by assets, served over forty million customers in four countries, and carried the implicit blessing of two of Kenya’s most powerful business dynasties, the Kenyattas and the Ndegwas.

    The optics were impeccable. The integration was another matter.

    Within six months of the merger closing, NCBA had permanently shuttered fourteen branches across Kenya, citing overlap in the combined network.

    Eight belonged to the former NIC Bank; six to former CBA. Customers who had built relationships with those branches were advised to visit alternatives. The branch closure programme was framed as an efficiency exercise.

    In a market where branch proximity and relationship banking remain powerful drivers of deposit loyalty, it was also a decision to surrender customer relationships built over decades.

    The integration of two distinct banking cultures, NIC’s conservative corporate-and-asset-finance model and CBA’s more retail-and-digital orientation, produced structural tensions that were never fully resolved.

    The duplication of risk management frameworks, credit systems, and customer data infrastructure created the kind of institutional complexity that makes fraud easier to execute and harder to detect. Evidence of that complexity has since appeared in Kenya’s courts.

    THE FRAUD FILES: A PATTERN, NOT AN INCIDENT

    NCBA has been at pains to present the criminal conduct that has surfaced within its operations as isolated incidents, the work of rogue individuals acting against the institution’s values. The court record tells a different story. It tells the story of a bank with systemic vulnerabilities in its internal controls, particularly in the critical space between customer accounts and the staff authorised to move funds within them.

    In November 2024, the Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions (ODPP) placed before Kisii Law Courts a case involving Philip Kiprono Rotich, the assistant operations manager at NCBA’s Kisii branch and a ten-year employee of the bank.

    According to an affidavit by Chief Inspector Johnson Kioli of the Banking Fraud Investigations Unit, Rotich allegedly orchestrated a systematic diversion of customer funds over nearly two years, from November 2023 to October 2024, by exploiting the trust placed in him by the branch’s largest clients.

    The funds were routed to his personal accounts at Kenya Commercial Bank and at NCBA itself, as well as through mobile banking platforms. What makes this case particularly alarming is not the scale alone.

    The ODPP told the court that Rotich continued to defraud customers even after being suspended by the bank. A suspended employee, stripped of his authority but apparently not his access, continued to steal from the accounts he had been entrusted to protect.

    The charge sheet eventually filed against Rotich was staggering in its detail. He faced 134 criminal charges. The alleged sum diverted was Sh52,404,084.95. The charges included theft by servant, acquisition and possession of proceeds of crime, forgery, and the utterance of false documents.

    Each charge represents a discrete act, a deliberate decision by a trusted insider to betray a customer. One hundred and thirty-four such acts, over a period spanning three years, at a single branch.

    The question that NCBA has never answered publicly is how an assistant operations manager at a branch with large corporate clients was able to execute more than a hundred and thirty fraudulent transactions before the bank’s own security systems flagged the problem.

    That question matters because Rotich’s case is not isolated. Court records from 2023 reveal a separate case involving NCBA’s Contact Centre and Credit Risk Management departments, in which employees were implicated in the unauthorised reactivation of dormant customer accounts and the execution of unauthorised debit transactions totalling over Sh3.2 million.

    In February 2023, eight individuals were charged with stealing Sh449.6 million from NCBA through the Fuliza mobile overdraft facility.

    More recently, a software engineer working as a contractor on NCBA’s mobile banking infrastructure in Rwanda was found to have used his legitimate system access to open floodgates for mobile banking fraud.

    The pattern across these cases is consistent: trusted insiders and contractors exploiting inadequate oversight of privileged system access.

    THE DATA PRIVACY RECORD: FINED, TWICE

    A bank’s internal controls are only as strong as its data management practices. NCBA’s record on data protection is not one that should inspire confidence in customers who share sensitive financial and personal information with the institution.

    In November 2024, Kenya’s Office of the Data Protection Commissioner (ODPC) ordered NCBA Bank to pay Sh250,000 in compensation to a UK-based solicitor, Rose Wambui Muigai, after finding that the bank had disclosed her personal data, including her name, phone number, and motor vehicle details, to third parties who were former NCBA employees, without any lawful basis.

    The solicitor had received repeated calls from people identifying themselves as NCBA staff and revealing her financial information. Data Commissioner Immaculate Kassait ruled that the bank had processed the complainant’s personal data in violation of the right to privacy under Section 25(a) of the Data Protection Act.

    In a separate ruling in April 2025, the ODPC again sanctioned NCBA, ordering the bank to pay a second Sh250,000 fine after it was found to have persistently sent a business customer’s transaction details to the wrong email address for years, even after both the customer and the unintended recipient had repeatedly notified the bank of the error.

    The Data Commissioner ruled that NCBA had either intentionally or negligently violated the customer’s right to erasure.

    The penalty is modest.

    The behavioural pattern it reveals is not. A bank that receives two regulatory determinations for data mishandling within six months, in different factual circumstances, does not have an isolated data management problem. It has a systemic one.

    DIGITAL LENDING: THE NUMBERS BEHIND THE NUMBERS

    NCBA has staked much of its institutional identity on its dominance of Kenya’s digital lending market. The bank is co-owner of Fuliza, the M-Pesa overdraft product operated with Safaricom, and operates M-Shwari, the mobile savings-and-credit product it launched as Commercial Bank of Africa in 2012. In 2025, NCBA reported disbursing over one trillion shillings in digital loans, a figure its management has repeatedly cited as evidence of market leadership and innovation.

    What this figure does not tell the story of is the quality of those loans or the social cost of the model on which they rest. M-Shwari has for years charged a flat facilitation fee that, when annualised, translates to an effective rate that regulators and consumer advocates have consistently described as far in excess of what conventional banking would permit.

    When this publication examined the arithmetic previously, a one-month M-Shwari loan at the standard flat charge represented an annualised rate that dwarfs the Central Bank’s benchmark by multiples. Fuliza, the overdraft product embedded in M-Pesa, charges a daily fee structure that, on an annualised basis, has historically exceeded three hundred percent.

    The consequence of lending at these rates to the most financially vulnerable segment of the Kenyan economy is visible in NCBA’s own balance sheet.

    The bank was required to write off Sh11.25 billion in bad Fuliza and M-Shwari loans under the Central Bank’s 2022 credit repair framework, a programme designed to release over four million Kenyans from the negative credit listings that digital borrowing at predatory rates had generated. NCBA was the single largest participant in that write-off programme, a distinction that reflects the scale of its digital lending but also the rate at which those loans were going bad. By Q3 2025, provisions for credit losses had jumped 24.5 percent year-on-year to Sh5.1 billion, a figure that management described as a conservative risk posture while simultaneously disbursing over a trillion shillings in new digital credit.

    THE OWNERSHIP STRUCTURE THAT WAS HIDDEN IN PLAIN SIGHT

    NCBA Group has always carried the financial weight of two of Kenya’s most storied dynasties. The Kenyatta family, heirs to the legacy of founding President Jomo Kenyatta, and the Ndegwa family, descendants of the late Philip Ndegwa who served as Governor of the Central Bank of Kenya, between them built the two institutions that became NCBA. What Kenya’s investing public has not always appreciated is the full scale of those holdings and the specific governance dynamics they create.

    On December 1, 2025, Muhoho Kenyatta, the younger brother of former President Uhuru Kenyatta, was appointed to the NCBA board as a non-executive director. That appointment came amid buyout talks with South Africa’s Nedbank Group that had already been underway. Five months later, when Nedbank filed its formal offer circular in May 2026, Muhoho’s appointment triggered mandatory disclosure requirements that revealed, for the first time, the full scale of his personal stake in the institution: 227,395,137 NCBA shares, a position worth approximately Sh20 billion at prevailing market prices.

    The governance question that this sequence of events raises is direct. A director who holds a personal financial interest of Sh20 billion in an institution joined the board of that institution in the same period that a takeover bid which would yield him a premium above market value was being negotiated.

    The Capital Markets Authority of Kenya’s rules on conflicts of interest in takeover transactions require disclosure, which NCBA has provided. What they do not require is for the public to simply accept that a board member sitting on a transaction that will deliver him a twenty-billion-shilling windfall represents a governance arrangement that small shareholders and depositors should be comfortable with.

    The combined Kenyatta and Ndegwa family positions represent the most concentrated family ownership in Kenya’s tier-one banking sector.

    The Ndegwa family holds its stake through various vehicles totalling over 11 percent of the institution.

    Together, the two families, alongside their related investment vehicles, committed enough shares to guarantee the 66 percent acceptance threshold that Nedbank required. By February 2026, irrevocable commitments from shareholders representing 77.54 percent of NCBA’s issued shares had been secured. The families had in effect pre-sold the bank before the transaction was put to any other shareholder for consideration.

    THE NEDBANK DEAL: EXIT OR ENDORSEMENT?

    Nedbank Group of South Africa, acting on the explicit logic that its home market is saturating while East Africa offers growth, has offered Sh105 per share for a 66 percent controlling stake in NCBA Group, in a transaction valued at approximately Sh109.6 billion.

    The consideration is structured as 20 percent cash and 80 percent newly issued Nedbank shares listed on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange. The deal values NCBA at approximately 1.4 times its book value.

    The mainstream coverage of this transaction has focused almost entirely on the premium it offers over the pre-announcement trading price.

    That framing is convenient for the founding families and for Nedbank’s communications team.

    It is less helpful for the depositor in Nakuru who banks with NCBA because it is Kenyan, or the small investor who bought shares at Sh69.50 in October 2025 before acquisition speculation sent the price surging, or the pensioner whose retirement savings sit in an institution that will, if the deal closes as planned in the third quarter of 2026, become a subsidiary of a South African group whose primary strategic rationale for the purchase is expansion beyond its saturated home market into Ethiopia and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

    What the deal reveals, if it reveals anything, is that Kenya’s two most powerful banking dynasties have concluded that the best available outcome for their capital is to convert their NCBA holdings into Nedbank shares and cash, rather than to continue holding a Kenyan institution at current valuations. Sophisticated investors sell when they believe the price offered exceeds what they would earn by holding.

    That is the transaction on the table. Retail investors and depositors are invited to draw their own conclusions about what the founding families’ exit from the institution they built says about their long-term confidence in its standalone potential.

    THE PROFITABILITY GAP THAT IS CLOSING

    NCBA’s management has correctly pointed to the bank’s profit growth as evidence that the institution is performing. The 2025 full-year profit after tax of Sh23.4 billion was a seven percent increase from Sh21.9 billion in 2024. Profit before tax in 2024 of Sh25.1 billion was actually lower than the Sh25.5 billion recorded in 2023, a decline attributed to increased operating expenses and reduced foreign currency trading income. The trajectory, when examined quarterly, is one of narrowing margins and slowing growth.

    The comparison with I&M Group is instructive because the two banks have been running in parallel for the same prize. In 2023, the profitability gap between NCBA and I&M stood at Sh8.1 billion in NCBA’s favour. By 2024 that gap had narrowed to Sh5.92 billion. By 2025 it was Sh3.55 billion. I&M grew its net profit by 24.4 percent in 2025. NCBA grew its by 7 percent.

    At the current rate of convergence, the profitability gap closes within two years. Given that I&M has already overtaken NCBA on the asset line, the directional question the market should be asking is not where these institutions stand today but where they will stand in 2028 when the minimum capital requirements being phased in by the Central Bank of Kenya take full effect at Sh10 billion.

    The capital requirement escalation, which mandates core capital of Sh5 billion by end-2026, Sh6 billion by end-2027, Sh8 billion by 2028, and Sh10 billion by end-2029, is designed to produce consolidation. NCBA, as a Nedbank subsidiary, will navigate that requirement with the backing of a JSE-listed parent.

    The thirty-four percent of NCBA shares that will remain on the NSE after the deal closes will be minority positions in an institution where strategy, capital allocation, and expansion decisions are made in Johannesburg.

    THE CLIENTS WHO VOTED WITH THEIR FEET

    Institutional confidence in NCBA has been measured not only by balance sheet flows but by the behaviour of major commercial clients. Among the clients lost by WPP Scangroup, the Nairobi-listed marketing and communications group, in the period since its board changes in 2021 were four significant institutions: KCB Group, Equity Bank, NCBA Group and Airtel Africa.

    The departure of NCBA from WPP Scangroup’s client roster was noted in shareholder documents filed in May 2026 by minority investors seeking to oust the Scangroup board. The bank’s exit from one of Kenya’s most prominent marketing firms is not, by itself, a material event. It is, however, another small data point in a pattern.

    WHAT PRUDENT STAKEHOLDERS SHOULD ASK

    Customers who bank with NCBA are entitled to ask their institution the following questions, none of which NCBA’s public communications have answered satisfactorily.

    How many unresolved fraud investigations are currently active across the bank’s branch network, and what systemic control failures facilitated the cases that have reached the courts? What is the current status of the bank’s data management compliance programme following two regulatory determinations in less than twelve months? When Nedbank completes its acquisition, which is expected by the third quarter of 2026, what protections will the Central Bank of Kenya require to be in place to ensure that depositors’ funds held in an institution now controlled by a foreign parent receive equivalent regulatory oversight? And for those customers who bank with NCBA because it is a Kenyan institution backed by Kenyan capital, what precisely does that characterisation mean after the Kenyatta and Ndegwa families have completed their exit?

    Shareholders who have not yet tendered their shares under the Nedbank offer, which closes on July 10, 2026, face a version of the same question.

    The offer price of Sh105 per share represents a 20.3 percent premium over the pre-announcement market price.

    The eighty percent of that consideration that is payable in Nedbank shares is denominated in rand and priced on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange.

    Shareholders accepting this structure will exchange liquid NSE holdings for JSE-listed shares in a South African lender whose primary reason for acquiring NCBA is access to markets, Ethiopia and the DRC, where the risks and timelines for return are substantially longer than the East African operations that have generated NCBA’s historic profits.

    For investors who choose to remain in the thirty-four percent rump that will continue to trade on the NSE, the relevant question is what governance rights they will have in an institution where the majority shareholder is a foreign group whose primary accountability is to its own shareholders and regulators in South Africa.

    THE CONCLUSION THE EVIDENCE COMPELS

    NCBA Group is not a failed bank.

    Its profits are real, its digital lending volumes are extraordinary, and its management team is competent. None of that is under dispute here.

    What is under dispute is the institutional narrative that has been sold to Kenya’s investing public: that NCBA is a growing, well-governed, domestically-anchored institution that represents a sound long-term home for deposits and investment capital.

    The evidence assembled in this report points to a different characterisation.

    This is a bank whose asset base has contracted for multiple consecutive periods while competitors grow. It is a bank that has produced two regulatory findings for data mishandling in a single year.

    It is a bank whose internal fraud record reflects unresolved systemic vulnerabilities in its branch operations and digital infrastructure.

    It is a bank whose founding shareholders are in the process of converting their equity into the shares of a foreign institution, structured in a way that delivers them a guaranteed premium while the minority shareholders they leave behind inherit positions in a controlled subsidiary.

    It is a bank whose digital lending franchise, while commercially impressive, rests on a model that has generated Sh11.25 billion in write-offs and trapped millions of low-income Kenyans in cycles of high-cost debt.

    None of this means depositors should withdraw their funds tomorrow or that shareholders should tender at Sh105 without independent financial advice.

    What it means is that the due diligence question that NCBA’s marketing materials will never ask on your behalf is the one this publication is asking on the record.

    Is this, in its current form and on its current trajectory, the institution you were told it was? The balance sheet says no. The court docket says no. The exit of the founding families says no.

    The Nedbank offer closes July 10, 2026.

    This report was prepared from publicly available financial disclosures, court records filed at Milimani Law Courts and the Employment and Labour Relations Court, determinations of the Office of the Data Protection Commissioner, and regulatory filings with the Capital Markets Authority of Kenya and the Nairobi Securities Exchange. No information in this report has been fabricated. All figures are sourced from primary documents.

  • Shiquo wa Hii Style Counts Costly Lesson After Anti-Counterfeit Raid Wipes Out Shop Stock

    Shiquo wa Hii Style Counts Costly Lesson After Anti-Counterfeit Raid Wipes Out Shop Stock

    Popular entrepreneur and social media personality Shiquo wa Hii Style is facing a painful business setback after anti-counterfeit enforcement officers reportedly raided her shop and confiscated merchandise worth millions of shillings in a sweeping operation targeting fake goods.

    The trader, who has built a large online following through her retail business dealing in shoes, clothing and household products, revealed that virtually her entire shoe inventory was seized during the crackdown, leaving her operations severely crippled.

    Speaking in a video shared online, Shiquo described the raid as a devastating experience that forced her to confront the realities of dealing in products found to be counterfeit.

    “Every piece of shoe was taken because they were counterfeit. There was a big problem. We have to start again, relearn, rebuild and do it again,” she said.

    The businesswoman admitted the losses were substantial, warning fellow traders that the consequences of stocking counterfeit products can be financially ruinous.

    “It’s a big loss for me. I would not want whatever has happened to me to happen to anybody else. If you are dealing with counterfeit products, be careful because they will take everything and it will cost you so much,” she said.

    Her remarks come amid an intensified nationwide crackdown by Kenya’s Anti-Counterfeit Authority (ACA), which has in recent months conducted a series of high-profile raids targeting fake products ranging from footwear and electronics to vehicle spare parts and alcoholic beverages. Authorities have seized and destroyed counterfeit goods worth hundreds of millions of shillings as part of efforts to protect consumers and legitimate businesses.

    Earlier this year, ACA officers confiscated suspected counterfeit branded sneakers in Eldoret, while separate operations in Kisumu and other regions led to the seizure of fake goods worth tens of millions of shillings.

    The authority has maintained that counterfeit products undermine legitimate enterprises, expose consumers to substandard goods and deny the government significant tax revenue.

    For Shiquo, however, the raid appears to have triggered a deeper rethink of her business strategy.

    Rather than focusing on blame, she said the experience had convinced her of the need to build authentic brands and invest in locally produced products.

    “Let us start and learn to build our own things. We can also grow something from scratch and not depend on other people,” she said.

    She argued that supporting local manufacturing could create wider economic benefits, from job creation to stronger homegrown brands capable of competing with imported products.

    Her comments echo growing calls from government agencies and industry players for Kenyan entrepreneurs to shift away from imitation goods and invest in original products that can create sustainable businesses.

    Despite the financial blow, Shiquo insists she is determined to rebuild.

    The entrepreneur said the raid should serve as a wake-up call to traders who continue to stock questionable merchandise, warning that enforcement agencies are becoming increasingly aggressive in tracking counterfeit products.

    “If you are in this business, do the necessary because they are coming and they do not care,” she said.

    The confiscation has left her starting almost from scratch, but the trader says the lesson learned may ultimately prove more valuable than the stock she lost.

    For many small and medium-sized traders operating in Kenya’s highly competitive retail sector, her experience is likely to reinforce a growing reality: the era of treating counterfeit goods as a low-risk shortcut to profits is rapidly coming to an end.

  • “Are They Giving Kickbacks To Government Officials?” The Scandalous Record Behind Kenya’s Most Favoured Chinese Contractor

    “Are They Giving Kickbacks To Government Officials?” The Scandalous Record Behind Kenya’s Most Favoured Chinese Contractor

    It was the kind of question that does not get asked in Kenya’s parliament without reason. During a Public Investments Committee hearing on June 5, 2024, Saboti MP Caleb Amisi turned to officials of China Jiangxi International Company and delivered a question that cut through the usual parliamentary circumspection: ‘Why has one single company been given all these multibillion tenders for these projects? Are there kickbacks being given to government officials?’

    The company’s officials did not answer. The session ended abruptly. The committee noted for the record Jiangxi International Limited Kenya’s inability to provide satisfactory responses. That premature adjournment was itself a statement. When a company that has formally admitted to completing 14 government projects and holding five more cannot explain to Parliament’s watchdog committee why it keeps winning government contracts, the public interest question that MP Amisi raised does not go away by being left unanswered.

    Two days ago, on June 7, 2026, Business Daily reported that the same company had abandoned the Sh19.99 billion Soin-Koru Multipurpose Dam site in Kisumu and Kericho counties, prompting Auditor-General Nancy Gathungu to write in her report on the National Water Harvesting and Storage Authority those four devastating words: the contractor is not on site. The dam was supposed to end a sixty-year wait for communities across the Nyando basin. It was a Vision 2030 flagship. It is now another entry in a file of public money collected and public works not delivered.

    That file, assembled for the first time in its entirety here, is staggering. This investigation traces every documented project, every audit flag, every parliamentary exchange and every court judgment that bears China Jiangxi International Kenya Limited’s name. It calculates, to the extent the available record allows, what Kenya has paid and what Kenya has received in return. It asks who in the Kenyan government has been approving these contracts and what oversight was applied before, during and after each award. And it names the accountability actions that must now follow.

    “Why has one single company been given all these multibillion tenders for these projects? Are there kickbacks being given to government officials?” MP Caleb Amisi, Public Investments Committee, June 5, 2024.

    WHO IS CHINA JIANGXI INTERNATIONAL?

    China Jiangxi International Economic and Technical Cooperation Co. Ltd, whose Kenyan subsidiary is registered as China Jiangxi International Kenya Limited, is a state-owned enterprise supervised by the State-Owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission of Jiangxi Province in China. It was established in 1983 with the approval of the State Council of the People’s Republic of China. Its parent company has operated in more than 50 countries and regions across Africa, Asia, Oceania and Latin America. By its own published account, CJIC has delivered over 600 international contracting projects with a total contract value of approximately eight billion US dollars.

    That global scale and state backing are precisely what make its conduct in Kenya so consequential. This is not a fly-by-night local contractor padding invoices on a county road project. This is a firm owned by the Chinese state, headquartered in Nanchang, operating in Kenya through a locally registered subsidiary, collecting tens of billions of shillings in Kenyan public money and deploying the structural advantages of state ownership, diplomatic immunity from normal commercial consequences and institutional permanence to insulate itself from accountability.

    The subsidiary in Kenya has its own Managing Director, identified in parliamentary records as one Jimmy Ji, who has appeared before the Public Investments Committee on multiple occasions and on each occasion left lawmakers more exasperated than reassured. The company also runs private commercial operations in Kenya, including, according to testimony by MP Caleb Amisi before the committee, the construction of luxury apartments in Kilimani in Nairobi and in Kikambala on the Mombasa coast, simultaneously with its public sector contracts. The question that raises is whether the same capacity, management bandwidth and financial resources being deployed on private luxury residential developments should, under the terms of public contracts, be exclusively allocated to delivering government infrastructure.

    THE TAXPAYER’S RUNNING LEDGER: WHAT WAS PROMISED, WHAT WAS DELIVERED, WHAT WAS LOST

    A project-by-project reconstruction of the documented record produces what must be described as an extraordinary pattern of public value destruction. The figures that follow are drawn exclusively from parliamentary records, Auditor-General reports, court judgments and verified media documentation.

    The Hazina Trade Centre, commissioned by the National Social Security Fund in 2013, was originally contracted at Sh6.72 billion for a 36-storey tower that would have been the tallest building in East Africa. The tender awarded to China Jiangxi International Kenya Limited came after a process whose integrity was immediately contested: the company had been disqualified in the first open tender, then challenged the award to Kenyan firm Cementers Limited in court alongside China Wu Yi. The court ruled in the Chinese firms’ favour. NSSF re-advertised the project through a restricted tender. The new tender conditions required bidders to prove completion of two projects of 40 storeys each in the previous five years, a qualification designed, Cementers alleged, to make the field unwinnable for any local company. China Jiangxi won the re-tendered restricted contract.

    At the technical evaluation stage, the company was then permitted by NSSF to adjust its bid price upward by Sh115 million to Sh6.72 billion from Sh6.6 billion, enabling it to displace China National Aero Technology whose bid was Sh6.74 billion. The PIC later established that only two companies competed for the Sh6.7 billion restricted tender after the manipulation of qualification thresholds had thinned the field. This is not competitive procurement. It is procurement theatre staged for the benefit of a predetermined outcome.

    What followed over the next decade comprehensively vindicates the suspicions that surrounded the award. The project was stopped barely two weeks after the 2013 groundbreaking by a court injunction from retail tenant Nakumatt, which disputed construction on its occupied premises. Construction resumed, reached the 15th floor, and then stopped again following a Ministry of Public Works structural assessment that found the existing building’s beams could not safely support more than 25 floors. The scope was reduced from 36 floors to 15, a 58 percent reduction in scope against a 39 percent reduction in price, with no clear paperwork documenting the variation. China Jiangxi then submitted compensation claims of Sh871.7 million for idle time. NSSF paid Sh653.8 million of that claim. The company then filed a demand of Sh6.88 billion in fresh claims through its project managers, which, if honoured, would bring the total cost of a 15-floor building to over Sh13 billion.

    Kiminini MP Chris Wamalwa, during a 2018 PIC inspection of the site, stated the conclusion plainly: “This is pure robbery with violence. I see a conspiracy between NSSF and Jiangxi International to swindle taxpayers billions of shillings.”

    That accusation has never been formally investigated to a conclusion by any prosecutorial authority.

    The Nyayo Estate Embakasi Phase VI project, a Sh2.2 billion contract for 324 housing units awarded in June 2013 with an 18-month completion timeline, produced 44 units. The Auditor-General’s 2019 report warned of the risk of losing Sh215 million in advance payments. By October 2025, the most recent period covered by the latest NSSF audit, works certified at Sh274.7 million had been paid at Sh227.9 million plus a Sh215.5 million mobilisation advance, producing an overpayment of Sh168.8 million. No refund had been made. Twelve years after the contracted completion date, 280 families remain without the housing units their pension contributions funded.

    The Bunge Tower parliamentary office complex, initiated in 2010 for Sh5.89 billion with a 42-month completion window, was delivered in 2024 at a final cost that Senator Samson Cherargei placed at Sh9.6 billion after all cost revisions, financial claims and interest on delayed payments were aggregated. That is a 63 percent cost overrun on a building whose initial budget already represented a then-unprecedented sum of public money. The contract period was extended three times. When MPs finally moved in, Senator Cherargei listed incomplete construction on some floors, a non-functioning lift, offices without windows, poor floor work and lighting systems that did not function. Senator Richard Onyonka confirmed colleagues were complaining that the building had not been finished to tender specifications. Senator Okiya Omtatah subsequently reported cracks appearing in the newly built structure. The Parliamentary Service Commission never published a certificate of completion satisfying the questions raised.

    The Soin-Koru Dam, contracted at Sh19.99 billion in May 2022 with a five-year completion period, is now nearly three years in with no dam built, no Intake Tower B commenced, no river diversion works started, no road pavements begun, no drainage structures laid, no access roads constructed, no water abstraction facilities or hydropower infrastructure commenced and no security installations underway. The only physical output is a spillway at 15 percent completion. The contractor is not on site. Approximately 1,200 displaced families are waiting for infrastructure that does not exist.

    The Umaa Dam in Kitui County, a Sh1.96 billion project assigned to a joint venture including China Jiangxi, also carries Auditor-General delay flags despite the contractor having mobilised to site in January 2024 with a two-year completion mandate.

    “This is pure robbery with violence. I see a conspiracy between NSSF and Jiangxi International to swindle taxpayers billions of shillings.” MP Chris Wamalwa, Public Investments Committee, 2018.

    THE PROCUREMENT MANIPULATION PLAYBOOK

    Reviewing the documented procurement history across China Jiangxi International’s major contracts reveals what can only be described as systematic manipulation of public procurement processes. The Hazina Trade Centre sequence is the most elaborately documented but the pattern repeats.

    At Hazina, the company was disqualified in the initial open competitive tender. Rather than accept that outcome, it challenged the award in court alongside another Chinese firm, not on grounds of procedural irregularity affecting the public interest, but to block a Kenyan competitor from performing a contract it had lawfully won. The court’s ruling forced NSSF to cancel the Cementers award and restart procurement. When the fund re-advertised, the new qualification threshold requiring prior completion of two 40-storey structures effectively locked out every local Kenyan construction company. Only Chinese firms could plausibly have met such a condition. The tender was then run as a restricted process in which only two companies competed, one of which was China Jiangxi, whose bid was subsequently permitted to be adjusted upward before the evaluation was finalised.

    At the Parliament Tower, the procurement attracted a formal challenge from Petu Developers Limited, which alleged the contract award to China Jiangxi breached procurement law and that taxpayers stood to lose Sh245.6 million because a lower-qualifying bidder had been selected over the cheapest compliant tender. The case was eventually settled by withdrawal, clearing the path for China Jiangxi. But the challenge itself was public testimony to the contestability of the award.

    The Soin-Koru award in 2022 has attracted comparatively less scrutiny of its procurement origination despite the company’s fully documented record by that point across Hazina, Embakasi and Bunge Tower. Any due diligence review of China Jiangxi International Kenya Limited as a prospective contractor for a Sh19.99 billion flagship water project would have surfaced the Nyayo Estate refusal, the Hazina Trade Centre scale-down and compensation scandal, the Bunge Tower decade of delays and cost overruns, the EACC investigation into the Parliament Tower contract, and the multiple Employment and Labour Relations Court judgments against the company for worker mistreatment. The contract was awarded regardless.

    The question that this pattern raises is not whether the pattern exists. The documented record establishes it beyond reasonable doubt. The question is who within the relevant procuring entities, the National Social Security Fund, the Parliamentary Service Commission and the National Water Harvesting and Storage Authority, authorised these awards after reviewing due diligence, and whether the decisions were commercially rational or required external inducement. That is the question that the EACC, the DPP and the PPRA must now formally investigate.

    THE KENHA CONNECTION: A BROADER WARNING

    A parallel parliamentary action, reported on June 8, 2026 and occurring geographically near the Soin-Koru dam, places the China Jiangxi scandal in an even sharper systemic context. The National Assembly’s Departmental Committee on Transport and Infrastructure, led by Vice Chairperson Didmus Barasa, issued a formal caution to the Kenya National Highways Authority during an inspection of the Kisumu-Mamboleo-Miwani-Chemelil-Muhoroni road project against the practice of concentrating multiple road contracts in the hands of a single contractor.

    Committee member Samuel Arama articulated the concern directly: giving one contractor many projects will strain them, especially when they are already facing challenges raising funds while awaiting government payments. This is an issue KeNHA can address through its procurement decisions. The committee noted that contractors with multiple simultaneous government contracts are struggling to complete projects due to financial constraints.

    The KeNHA warning, while directed at road contractors generally and not naming China Jiangxi, describes with precision the structural risk that the China Jiangxi portfolio embodies. Officials from China Jiangxi International themselves admitted before the PIC in June 2024 that the company simultaneously held at least five active government contracts, including the Centre for Parliamentary Studies and Training in Karen, while running private luxury residential construction projects in Kilimani and Kikambala. A company running five public contracts worth billions of shillings while simultaneously building private apartments in prime real estate locations is not a company operating with the focused capacity and financial ring-fencing that flagship national infrastructure demands.

    The geographical overlap is also striking. The KeNHA committee inspected the Kisumu-Mamboleo-Miwani road on June 8, one day after Business Daily reported the abandonment of the Soin-Koru dam. Both sites are within the same western Kenya economic corridor. Both represent critical infrastructure for the same communities. Both are flagged for contractor non-performance or systemic risk. The connection is not that China Jiangxi holds the Mamboleo road contract; it does not, that project is split across China Railways No. 10 Engineering Group, Sinohydro and H-Young EA. The connection is systemic: Kenya’s infrastructure delivery is plagued by a pattern in which contractors collect public money across multiple simultaneous contracts, underperform on each, blame government payment delays and leave communities waiting, while accountability mechanisms remain too slow, too deferential and too easily deflected to impose consequences.

    WHAT KENYA HAS ACTUALLY RECEIVED: A VALUE-FOR-MONEY ASSESSMENT

    The public value question is, at its most fundamental, arithmetical: what did Kenya pay for each major China Jiangxi contract, and what did it receive?

    On the Hazina Trade Centre, Kenya through NSSF paid an amount that by 2024 could plausibly exceed Sh5 billion when the original contract payments, the reduced-scope contract sum, the Sh653.8 million idle time compensation and the partial settlement of additional claims are aggregated. What it received was a 15-floor commercial building in a central Nairobi location, incomplete at the time of the most recent audit through June 2025, still without functioning lifts. The building that was supposed to be the tallest in East Africa and a landmark for the fund’s investment strategy is a mid-rise structure that has been under some form of contested construction or claim litigation for over a decade.

    On the Nyayo Estate Embakasi Phase VI, Kenya through NSSF paid approximately Sh443.4 million in mobilisation fees, certified works and an identified overpayment against a Sh2.2 billion contract. It received 44 housing units out of 324 contracted. The cost per unit actually constructed, calculated against total payments made, exceeds Sh10 million. The contract value of the unconstructed 280 units, at the original per-unit implied rate, represents approximately Sh1.9 billion in contracted housing not delivered.

    On Bunge Tower, Kenya through the Parliamentary Service Commission paid approximately Sh9.6 billion in all-in costs against an original Sh5.89 billion contract. It received a parliamentary office block that took 14 years to deliver against a contracted 42 months, that legislators publicly described as incomplete on delivery, whose lifts did not function at handover, whose offices lacked windows and whose structural integrity was raised as a concern by a serving senator within months of occupation. The cost overrun of approximately Sh3.7 billion above original contract value, plus Sh1.1 billion in financial claims and Sh225.2 million in delay interest, represents money Kenya spent on a building it already contractually owned before the claims were lodged.

    On the Soin-Koru Dam, Kenya has paid mobilisation and advance sums whose precise total NWHSA has not publicly disclosed. What it has received, per the Auditor-General’s inspection, is a spillway at 15 percent completion. Everything else on the project specification sheet is at zero. The contractor is absent. The communities that were displaced are waiting.

    Aggregate these figures and the unavoidable conclusion is that China Jiangxi International Kenya Limited has extracted from Kenyan public institutions, between confirmed payments, retained advances, idle time compensation and cost overruns, an amount conservatively estimated at well above Sh15 billion in real cash across the projects reviewed here, while delivering infrastructure whose value, quality and completeness falls dramatically short of contracted requirements. This is not commercial misfortune. It is a systematic extraction pattern executed across multiple client relationships over more than a decade.

    THE WORKERS WHOSE RIGHTS WERE DISCARDED

    Running in parallel with the financial record is an employment record that compounds the accountability indictment. Kenya’s courts contain dozens of judgments involving China Jiangxi International Kenya Limited and its various project iterations as respondents in employment disputes filed by workers across multiple sites.

    The Konza Technopolis project, where the company had construction work, generated at least one documented Employment and Labour Relations Court case in 2018 in which a mason employed since July 2016 was summarily dismissed without notice, without a disciplinary hearing and without terminal benefits after a workplace incident involving a Chinese foreman. The claimant testified that he reported to the Labour Department, which wrote to the company demanding payment of terminal benefits, and that the company did not respond. His NSSF dues were paid only after some time had elapsed. He had no written contract of employment.

    This single case reflects a pattern documented across sites from Kisumu to Malindi to Kitale: China Jiangxi International Kenya Limited routinely employed Kenyan workers on verbal or inadequately documented arrangements, paid them irregularly, denied them written termination procedures, failed to remit NSSF contributions on schedule and resisted Labour Department enforcement. The workers who raised these claims were overwhelmingly low-income casual labourers, the most economically vulnerable participants in Kenya’s construction sector, pursuing claims against a state-backed Chinese corporation through years of litigation for amounts measured in tens or hundreds of thousands of shillings. That many of them succeeded in court is a tribute to the Kenyan judiciary. That they had to litigate at all, against a company that has simultaneously collected billions in public contracts, is a reproach to the oversight systems that were supposed to protect them.

    THE EACC AND THE INVESTIGATIONS THAT MUST COME

    The Ethics and Anti-Corruption Commission’s previous engagement with China Jiangxi International is instructive about both the potential and the limits of existing accountability mechanisms. When the Auditor-General’s 2019-2020 report flagged the Parliament Tower project for slow progress, illegal contract variation exceeding the 25 percent statutory cap, sub-contractor irregularities and a procuring entity without a title deed to its own construction site, the EACC assigned three investigators to visit the site and review the documentation. They collected materials. They monitored the situation.

    No public prosecution or formal determination emerged from that investigation. The EACC’s spokesman at the time confirmed only that the matter was flagged by the Auditor-General and we are monitoring it. Monitoring, in this context, appears to mean watching a pattern unfold while the contractor continues to collect public money and bid for new contracts.

    The EACC must now be required to account for the outcome of its Parliament Tower investigation and to open formal investigations into: the procurement of the Hazina Trade Centre restricted tender including the disqualification challenge, the qualification threshold manipulation and the bid adjustment; the approval of the scope reduction and associated price reduction at Hazina; the authorisation and payment of Sh653.8 million in idle time compensation; the retention of Sh215.5 million in Embakasi mobilisation fees; and the award of the Soin-Koru contract to a company whose documented record of performance failures was entirely available to the procuring entity before the contract was signed.

    The DPP must consider whether the documented conduct, advance payment capture without delivery, refusal to refund after project failure, compensation claims lodged for contractor-attributable delays, scope reductions without proportionate price reductions, and the deliberate obstruction of parliamentary oversight through inadequate testimony, constitutes conduct warranting criminal investigation under the Anti-Corruption and Economic Crimes Act and the Public Procurement and Asset Disposal Act.

    THE DIPLOMATIC DIMENSION KENYA HAS REFUSED TO CONFRONT

    No accountability analysis of China Jiangxi International Kenya Limited is complete without acknowledging its nature as a state-owned enterprise of the People’s Republic of China. The parent company, CJIC, is supervised by the Jiangxi Province State-Owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission. It was established with the approval of the State Council of China. Its operations are not private commercial activity independent of Chinese state policy. They are extensions of that state’s overseas economic engagement.

    China has invested heavily in presenting its Africa engagement as a partnership framework built on mutual benefit, non-interference and South-South solidarity. Those claims are tested by the conduct of its state-owned enterprises on the ground. When a state-owned Chinese construction company abandons a Sh20 billion dam that Kenyan communities have waited for since the 1960s, refuses to refund advance payments it has held for over a decade, delivers a parliamentary office building after 14 years at 63 percent cost overrun, and sends its managing director to Parliament to present documents that legislators publicly call jokers, the gap between the partnership rhetoric and the operational reality is not a marginal discrepancy. It is a systematic mismatch.

    Kenya’s government has been reluctant to escalate complaints about Chinese contractor behaviour to the diplomatic level, partly out of dependency on Chinese financing for infrastructure, partly out of the informal protocol that governs bilateral relations and partly, perhaps, because some of the beneficiaries of the procurement arrangements that favour these companies have an interest in not having them examined too closely. That reluctance must end. The Kenyan government has both the right and the obligation to formally represent to the Chinese Embassy and to the relevant Chinese state authorities that the conduct of China Jiangxi International Kenya Limited across its portfolio of public contracts constitutes a breach of the standards that bilateral partnership implies.

    ACCOUNTABILITY ACTIONS: A CHECKLIST FOR PARLIAMENT, THE PPRA, THE EACC AND THE TREASURY

    The Parliamentary Service Commission, the NSSF Board and the NWHSA Board must each immediately disclose the full financial settlement of every contract with China Jiangxi International Kenya Limited: total amounts paid, total amounts certified, total amounts in dispute, status of performance bonds and whether bond triggers have been evaluated.

    The Public Procurement Regulatory Authority must initiate a formal review of every competitive and restricted procurement process in which China Jiangxi International Kenya Limited was awarded a public contract, beginning with the Hazina Trade Centre restricted tender of 2013 and extending through the Soin-Koru award of 2022. The review must determine whether the procurement processes complied with the Public Procurement and Asset Disposal Act, whether any Kenyan public official was involved in manipulating qualification thresholds, restricting competition or approving irregular bid adjustments, and whether the company should be debarred from future public tenders pending the outcome.

    The PPRA must additionally consider whether the known conflict between the company’s simultaneous private commercial construction activity and its active public infrastructure contracts represents a violation of contract terms or procurement regulations, and whether capacity declarations made at the time of tender were accurate.

    Performance bonds on the Soin-Koru contract must be assessed for trigger compliance immediately. If trigger conditions are met, the bonds must be called without delay. NWHSA must disclose publicly what bonds are in place, their value and their current status.

    The EACC must be required to provide Parliament with a public update on the status of all investigations involving China Jiangxi International Kenya Limited within thirty days. If investigations were closed without prosecution, the reasons for closure must be published. If investigations are ongoing, the timeline for conclusion must be stated.

    The National Treasury must conduct a government-wide portfolio review of all active contracts with China Jiangxi International Kenya Limited and its associated joint venture entities, including the Umaa Dam joint venture and any other engagements not covered in this investigation, and determine the total sum currently held by the company in mobilisation advances, interim certificates and retention payments relative to independently verified physical progress on each contract.

    The Ministry of Foreign Affairs must initiate a formal diplomatic representation to the Chinese Embassy requesting engagement with the parent company’s supervisory authority, the Jiangxi Province SASAC, regarding the documented pattern of performance failure and its impact on Kenya-China infrastructure cooperation credibility.

    CONCLUSION: THE QUESTION THAT WAS ASKED AND NEVER ANSWERED

    MP Caleb Amisi asked the question that needed to be asked. He asked it directly, on the record, before a parliamentary committee, and the company’s officials could not respond. The session was adjourned. The question hung in the air of the committee room and dissipated into institutional silence.

    It has now been two years since that hearing. In the intervening period, China Jiangxi International Kenya Limited has been cited in the Auditor-General’s reports on two separate water infrastructure projects as either absent from the site or significantly behind schedule. The company’s construction of Bunge Tower has drawn complaints of cracks in the structure from a serving senator. Its managing director has appeared before Parliament and generated a formal committee notation of inability to provide satisfactory responses. And the company has done nothing to refund Sh384.3 million in combined identified overpayments and retained mobilisation advances across the Hazina and Embakasi contracts.

    The question MP Amisi asked was not reckless or sensational. It was the question any professional doing due diligence on a public contractor would ask when they discovered that a single company had won 14 government contracts worth tens of billions of shillings across more than a decade while generating an unbroken succession of audit flags, parliamentary investigations, court judgments and abandoned sites. In a transparent, well-governed procurement environment, the answer to that question would be provided voluntarily and proactively, by the public entities that awarded the contracts, in published records that allow citizens to verify the basis for each award.

    No such records have been published. The question remains open. The obligation to answer it does not belong to China Jiangxi International Kenya Limited. It belongs to the Kenyan public officials who authorised every contract this company has held, who signed every payment certificate, who approved every scope variation, who paid every compensation claim and who continued to award new contracts when the existing record demanded scrutiny rather than extension.

    The contractor may be absent from the Soin-Koru dam site. The public officials who put it there are not absent. They are in their offices. They should be summoned.

    DOCUMENTED FINANCIAL EXPOSURE SUMMARY: CHINA JIANGXI INTERNATIONAL KENYA LIMITED

    Project

    Original Contract

    Outcome / Overpayment

    Status

    Hazina Trade Centre (NSSF)

    Sh6.72bn / 36 floors

    15 floors built; Sh653.8m idle claims paid; Sh6.88bn fresh demand lodged; incomplete as at 2025

    Unresolved

    Nyayo Embakasi Phase VI (NSSF)

    Sh2.2bn / 324 units

    44 units built; Sh168.8m overpayment; Sh215.5m advance not refunded

    Unresolved

    Bunge Tower (PSC)

    Sh5.89bn / 42 months

    Sh9.6bn all-in cost; 14 years to deliver; structural complaints on handover

    Occupied; defects disputed

    Soin-Koru Dam (NWHSA)

    Sh19.99bn / 5 years

    15% on spillway only; contractor absent from site; all other works unstarted

    Critical failure

    Umaa Dam (NWHSA)

    Sh1.96bn / 2 years

    Auditor-General delay flags raised

    Under scrutiny
  • Two MPs Defrauded of Sh93.5 Million in Karen Land Scam

    Two MPs Defrauded of Sh93.5 Million in Karen Land Scam

    Two sitting Members of Parliament have found themselves at the center of a high-profile land fraud case after allegedly losing a combined Sh51 million in a failed attempt to acquire prime parcels in Nairobi’s affluent Karen suburb.

    The case, now before the Milimani Law Courts, has not only exposed an alleged multimillion-shilling property scam but has also drawn public attention to the scale of investments some elected leaders are making in Kenya’s lucrative real estate market.

    Nairobi businessman Abdiwahab Sheikh Abdi was charged with four counts of obtaining money by false pretences after prosecutors accused him of collecting Sh93.5 million from two MPs and two private investors through purported land sales that allegedly turned out to be fraudulent.

    According to court documents, Navakholo MP Emmanuel Wangwe allegedly paid Sh26 million for a parcel identified as LR No. 13873/3, while Ikolomani MP Bernard Masaka Shinali is said to have paid Sh25 million for LR No. 13873/9. Prosecutors claim the accused falsely represented that he had the authority and ability to transfer ownership of the properties.

    The revelations have thrust the legislators into an uncomfortable spotlight. While there is no suggestion that either MP committed any offence, the court proceedings have publicly exposed the scale of funds they were prepared to commit to property acquisitions in one of Nairobi’s most exclusive neighbourhoods.

    Karen remains among Kenya’s most expensive residential zones, with land prices often running into tens of millions of shillings per acre. The amounts cited in court have inevitably sparked public discussion about wealth, investments and financial disclosures among public officials, even as the MPs themselves are listed as complainants in the case.

    Abdiwahab Sheikh Abdi at the Milimani Law Courts on June 9, 2026 where he was charged with defrauding two MPs.

    The alleged fraud extended beyond the politicians. Businessman Ben Kiptoo Ego reportedly lost Sh26.5 million in a transaction involving LR No. 13873/2, while entrepreneur Abdikadir Ali Ibrahim allegedly paid Sh16 million for LR No. 13873/11.

    Prosecutors maintain that all four complainants were persuaded to part with money after being led to believe that the accused could legally transfer ownership of the properties. Investigators say those representations were false.

    The case adds to a growing list of multimillion-shilling land disputes and fraud allegations that continue to plague Kenya’s property sector. Despite digitisation efforts and reforms at the Ministry of Lands, fraudulent transactions involving forged titles, double allocations and unauthorised sales remain a persistent threat to investors.

    Appearing before Principal Magistrate Paul Mutai, Abdi denied all charges. He was released on a bond of Sh2 million or an alternative cash bail of Sh500,000 after the prosecution indicated it had no objection to his release.

    The case will be mentioned in two weeks for further directions.

    As the criminal proceedings unfold, attention is likely to remain fixed not only on the allegations against the businessman but also on what the case reveals about the high-stakes property deals being pursued by some of Kenya’s political elite.