The walls are closing in on Kaplan and Stratton.
Within weeks of each other, two senior partners at one of Kenya’s oldest and most celebrated commercial law firms have been dragged into separate but thematically identical storms — allegations of document fraud, manufactured evidence, and the manipulation of Kenya’s highest judicial processes.
But it is the case against Peter Mbuthia Gachuhi, accused of forging the will of Kenya’s second Attorney General, James Boro Karugu, that now poses the gravest threat to the firm’s storied reputation.
The charge is as stark as it is extraordinary. Gachuhi, a senior partner at the same institution that once acted for Karugu in his lifetime, stands accused by the Directorate of Criminal Investigations and the Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions of conspiring with five other individuals to fabricate the last will and testament of a man whose legal integrity was the defining feature of his public life.
The DPP approved charges on December 23, 2025, for forgery, uttering false documents, and conspiracy to defraud. For a firm whose letterhead has graced the most consequential transactions in East African commerce, the reputational consequences are incalculable.
THE DEAD MAN’S SIGNATURE
James Boro Karugu died on November 9, 2022, aged 86, at his Kiamara farm in Kiambu County. He was a man of towering legal intellect and fierce personal integrity.
He had resigned as Attorney General under President Daniel arap Moi in 1981 rather than bend his office to political pressure — a resignation that made him a singular figure in a generation of lawyers whose most common instinct was accommodation.
For four decades after leaving public life, he quietly built one of the most substantial private estates in the country’s legal history.
That estate spans over 753 acres across five counties, includes Treasury bonds valued at Sh404.7 million, shareholdings in Kenya Power and Nation Media Group, and a commercial building along Kenyatta Avenue in Nairobi’s central business district.
Control of the estate’s corporate holdings sits under Mathara Holdings Limited, a vehicle that Karugu’s firstborn daughter Victoria Nyambura Karugu ran as Chief Executive after her father’s dementia took hold in 2015.
Weeks after Karugu was laid to rest, a will dated April 2, 2014 was presented to family members at what has since been described as a carefully choreographed hotel event.
Alongside it came a trust deed establishing the JBK Foundation. Nyambura rejected both documents immediately.
She pointed to a will drawn up by Patel and Patel Advocates in 2010 as the authentic expression of her father’s wishes, and she noted that neither document had surfaced at any point during the former Attorney General’s lifetime.
She lodged a formal complaint with the DCI’s Economic and Commercial Crimes Unit, and the machinery of the State began to turn.
A FORENSIC RECKONING
What investigators uncovered has since become the cornerstone of the prosecution’s case.
Chief Inspector Duncan Maina, acting on behalf of the DPP and the DCI, filed an affidavit detailing how forensic examiners found that the contested will and trust deed bore grammatical errors, arithmetic mistakes, spelling blunders, and erratic page numbering entirely inconsistent with the standards of a man who had served as the country’s chief law officer.
The investigators characterised the documents as having been assembled in a cut-and-paste fashion from multiple sources.
The forensic report found that the initials appearing across all pages of both documents, purportedly those of Karugu, were forged, and that the signature page had been fraudulently attached to the main body of the will.
The execution page bore what the affidavit described as deliberate obscurity concealing its page number, raising the inference of deliberate tampering at the point of purported execution.
Witnesses to the will gave conflicting accounts of when and how it was signed, with some admitting they appended their signatures on different days. None could confirm witnessing the settlor or other trustees sign — a fundamental requirement under Kenyan law for a valid testamentary execution.
The DCI’s conclusion was unambiguous: the questioned initials and signatures were not those of James Boro Karugu. In the affidavit of Chief Inspector Maina, the State put its position with unusual bluntness.
The impugned will and trust deed, it said, bore several drafting concerns that did not resonate with the professional standards of a man of the stature of the deceased, described as an impeccable lawyer and the second Attorney General of the Republic of Kenya.
The initials, it stated plainly, were a forgery.
THE LAWYER WHO BARELY KNEW THE MAN
The inclusion of Gachuhi among the six suspects is not merely sensational. It is, according to Nyambura’s court filings, the logical product of a sustained pattern of conduct.
She has alleged in detailed affidavits that Gachuhi met her father only once in the eight years preceding his death — a meeting she says she attended and in which nothing about an executorship was discussed.
She further states that Gachuhi was not present at Karugu’s funeral or his memorial service and was never described by the former Attorney General as a close friend or confidant.
The conflict of interest angle is particularly damaging. Court papers reveal that Gachuhi and Kaplan and Stratton had previously represented Karugu in 2016 when a woman, Lucy Githire Muthoni, claimed to have been married to the former Attorney General.
A similar claim by another woman, Wambui Mwangi, also saw the firm instructed to deny all allegations of marriage while acknowledging paternity.
Having acted for Karugu in matters of the most intimate personal sensitivity, Gachuhi was now presenting himself as the executor of a will that Karugu’s own daughter says was manufactured after her father’s death.
On July 5, 2023, Gachuhi and two others filed a petition for a grant of probate through Kaplan and Stratton Advocates, seeking permission to execute the contested will.
The trio simultaneously applied to have the copy of the will sealed from parties outside the succession proceedings — a move Nyambura has argued in court was designed to obstruct DCI investigators who were simultaneously seeking access to the document for forensic examination.
Court papers further reveal that at least one petitioner initially resisted producing the originals before eventually surrendering copies.
Nyambura has gone further, alleging that the motive for the entire scheme is not difficult to identify.
A trust managed by executors under the direction of Kaplan and Stratton would have placed Karugu’s entire estate under the firm’s effective management for an indefinite period, generating a retainer whose financial value she describes as extraordinary.
The assets of the deceased, she has alleged in an affidavit, would have been placed under the direct control of Kaplan and Stratton until their full depletion, to the grave prejudice of the legitimate beneficiaries.
THE STATE SPEAKS
Attorney General Dorcas Oduor formally entered the arena on February 17, 2026, with grounds of opposition that described the petition by Gachuhi and his co-petitioners as incompetent, misconceived, and an abuse of the court process.
The Attorney General argued that the existence of the succession cause pending before the Family Division of the High Court created no bar to criminal investigations and prosecution. Forgery is a crime under the Penal Code, the State said, and cannot be resolved in a succession court that has no jurisdiction to determine criminal culpability.
The AG further argued that no constitutional rights of the petitioners had been violated by the investigations and that the conservatory orders obtained on January 19, 2026 — which had temporarily restrained the DPP and DCI from summoning, arresting, or charging the suspects — should not be extended. The State asked the court to dismiss both the application and the petition with costs and allow the criminal process to run its lawful course.
Senior Counsel Philip Murgor, acting for Nyambura, applied to have his client joined to the proceedings as an interested party, arguing that she is both the complainant in the criminal inquiry and an objector in the succession cause, and that her interests are proximate and identifiable rather than peripheral.
The constitutional petition is scheduled before Justice Bahati Mwamuye on April 21, 2026.
THE RIVAL REPORT
Gachuhi and his co-petitioners have not taken the DCI findings lying down.
They have produced a competing forensic report, authored by Anthony Ngige, the founder of Stealth Africa Consulting, a Nairobi-based risk management and forensic advisory firm.
Ngige’s report, presented to the court as part of the petitioners’ response, reached conclusions diametrically opposed to those of the State’s examiners.
He found no evidence of page insertion, document assembly, or material alteration and declared the allegations of forgery to be unsupported by forensic evidence.
He attributed variations in the handwriting to natural differences expected in genuine signatures and criticised the DCI for failing to employ advanced forensic methods including infrared photography.
The clash of forensic opinions is now itself a central issue in the litigation and will ultimately determine whether the criminal trial proceeds in earnest.
Courts will be asked to decide not only which examiner is more credible but whether the methodological differences between the two reports are material to the question of authenticity.
Gachuhi’s affidavit states that while Karugu had asked him in 2013 to serve as an executor and trustee for a planned foundation, he neither drafted the will nor the trust deed and is not a beneficiary under either document.
THE SECOND STORM
The crisis at Kaplan and Stratton deepened dramatically on February 16, 2026, when former Cabinet Secretary Raphael Tuju walked into DCI headquarters and formally recorded a criminal complaint against Senior Counsel Fred Ojiambo — the most senior partner at the firm and the same advocate who appeared in court to defend Gachuhi in the constitutional petition.
The two crises are now inextricably linked in public perception and, increasingly, in legal argument.
At the centre of Tuju’s complaint is a 27-acre prime property in Karen valued at approximately Ksh 1.5 billion, which has been the subject of a protracted dispute with the East African Development Bank arising from a 2015 loan facility that grew to more than Ksh 4.5 billion.
Tuju alleged that Ojiambo and other Kaplan and Stratton advocates procured affidavits from the bank’s former Kenya Country Manager that contained deliberate falsehoods, and that those affidavits were presented as having been properly commissioned before a Commissioner for Oaths when they were no such thing.
If established, the consequence would be that sworn evidence filed before both the High Court and the Supreme Court of Kenya was fraudulent.
Tuju told investigators that Ojiambo had also persuaded the High Court to recognise a diplomatic immunity claim on behalf of the EADB — an immunity Tuju flatly asserts does not exist in law — thereby freezing a separate criminal matter at the Magistrates Court for more than a year.
He further alleged the deployment of a fraudulent international warrant of arrest, attributed to a Ugandan magistrate’s court, as a mechanism of intimidation against him and his family.
Ojiambo denied every allegation. Speaking to journalists in a phone call, he was categorical: no affidavit had been falsified on any matter whatsoever.
A separate complaint was filed before the Senior Counsel Committee by Tuju’s lawyer seeking the removal of Ojiambo and former Attorney General Githu Muigai from the list of Senior Counsel on grounds of gross professional misconduct — a proceeding that, if successful, would constitute the most severe professional sanction short of disbarment that Kenya’s legal system can impose.
Outside DCI headquarters on the day he recorded his statement, Tuju delivered the line that has since defined the public character of the whole affair.
Fred Ojiambo, he declared, is a Bible-carrying fraud with a fake British accent.
The remark, intemperate but precisely aimed, has entered the lexicon of a scandal that is rewriting Kenyan legal history in real time.
A FIRM AT A CROSSROADS
Kaplan and Stratton was founded on the quiet conviction that commercial law, practised with rigour and discretion, could anchor itself above the turbulence of politics and scandal.
It has carried that reputation across decades and through multiple cycles of political upheaval.
The firm counts among its alumni and retainers some of the most significant transactions in East African corporate history. Its name has been synonymous with a kind of colonial-era solidity that newer firms have neither inherited nor replicated.
That name is now at the centre of what the Director of Public Prosecutions describes as a coordinated criminal scheme, and what the Attorney General has characterised as an abuse of the court process. Two of its most senior partners face formal criminal complaints.
Its letterhead appears on the probate petition at the centre of the forgery case.
Its managing partner appeared in court not to handle a client’s case but to defend a colleague facing prosecution for document fraud.
For Gachuhi and Ojiambo, the presumption of innocence is absolute. No charges have been formally laid and tried.
The DCI investigation into Tuju’s complaint remains at an early stage. The constitutional petition is yet to be determined. Conflicting forensic reports remain unresolved. The law will take its course.
But for an institution whose currency has always been reputation — whose value to clients rests precisely on the assumption that its word is its bond — the question of what the court finds is almost secondary to the question of what the market has already decided. And the market, in Kenya’s legal profession, has a long memory.
James Boro Karugu left school barefoot and sat in the gallery of the High Court mesmerised by men in white wigs.
He rose to become the one man who wore those wigs and refused to let them be used for anything other than justice.
The irony that his name and his estate are now at the centre of Kenya’s most consequential legal scandal is one that history will not easily forgive — whoever is ultimately found to be responsible.
