Tag: Raphael Tuju

It was barely past two in the morning when the vehicles arrived. More than fifty officers, some in police uniform, others in balaclavas and arriving in unmarked vehicles, pushed through the gates of Dari Business Park on Ngong Road in Karen and sealed every entrance. Staff at the adjacent Tamarind Restaurant, who had done nothing wrong in their lives, were bundled out into the cold.

Raphael Tuju, roused from sleep at his nearby residence, walked out to find a small army in possession of everything he had spent three decades building.

They produced no court orders. They offered no explanation. They simply occupied. And behind that occupation, if you follow the trail of money and litigation far enough back, you find the East African Development Bank.

The scenes that played out in the early hours of Saturday, March 14, 2026, brought an otherwise dry banking dispute crashing into public consciousness.

Kenyans watched their television screens and social media feeds in astonishment as a former Cabinet Secretary, a former Jubilee Party Secretary-General, a man who had served his country in senior office across more than two decades, found himself locked out of his own business and speaking to a camera in the dark like a man who had lost everything.

In a sense, he had. And the institution at the centre of it all, the Kampala-headquartered EADB, retreated behind a terse press statement about the rule of law and the finality of court orders.

That statement, released on March 16, 2026, was clinical in its detachment. “The EADB distances itself from the ongoing public theatre of the borrower’s distortion of facts and disinformation,” it read. “There must be finality of court matters.”

In eleven years of dealing with Tuju and his company Dari Limited, those are among the most revealing words EADB has ever committed to public record.

They reveal an institution that is congenitally incapable of self-examination, that processes its borrowers through a machinery of foreign jurisdictions and immunity shields, and that walks away from the wreckage of ruined projects with the serene confidence of an entity that knows the courts will always give it the last word.

This is the story of how that machinery worked, why it was allowed to work, and what it has cost the borrowers who dared believe in the bank’s development mandate.

The Promise: A Two-Phase Deal, a Prestigious Karen Project

To understand why Tuju is standing outside his own gates, you must go back to April 10, 2015, when Dari Limited, his project vehicle, signed a facility agreement with EADB for USD 9,197,084.

The money was for a development that was, at first blush, exactly the sort of project a development bank should celebrate: the acquisition of a 20-acre prime parcel in Karen’s Tree Lane area, the rehabilitation of a 94-year-old Victorian bungalow originally built by Scottish missionary Dr. Albert Patterson into a high-end restaurant, the construction of luxury wellness villas under the Entim Sidai brand, and the creation of the Dari Business Park commercial complex off Ngong Road.

Tuju himself, his three children Mano, Alma and Yma, and a related company, S.A.M Company Limited, signed on as guarantors and co-directors.

The loan was structured in two tranches. Phase one, amounting to the bulk of the facility, was to finance the land acquisition, with EADB paying the vendor directly.

Phase two, valued at Sh294 million, was earmarked for construction of the residential units: thirty three-bedroom maisonettes on the Tree Lane property and a further eighty-five units on a nearby seven-acre plot along Mwitu Road.

The sale of these high-end units was the engine that was supposed to generate the revenue to service the debt. Without them, the project was a restaurant, and a restaurant alone, as Tuju and his lawyers have argued repeatedly, cannot service a loan of that magnitude.

The first tranche was drawn on July 29, 2015. The first interest instalment fell due in October 2015, and Dari paid it. It would be the only payment EADB ever received.

That single, faithful payment is a detail that tends to get buried in the avalanche of legal proceedings that followed, but it matters. It tells you that Tuju was not a man who borrowed money with no intention of repaying.

It tells you that the project was at a stage where service was possible. And it tells you that whatever broke between October 2015 and the second quarter of 2016, when the loan formally fell into default, something went catastrophically wrong with the project’s cash flow.

“I cannot explain why the second tranche was not disbursed since I was not in senior management. Conditions were to be met to release the money, but I did not know what happened.” – David Odongo, EADB’s own Kenya Country Manager, testifying in court, 2024

According to Tuju, what went wrong was that EADB refused to disburse phase two. The bank, he alleges, suddenly introduced new conditions for the release of the construction funds, including additional security over an Upper Hill property that was already charged to the Bank of Africa.

Without the construction money, the villas could not be built, the anticipated revenues never materialised, and the loan became unpayable. The bank counters that conditions for release were never met by Dari Limited and that it was never formally committed to the second disbursement.

The truth, in the form of sworn court testimony, arrived in July 2024 when David Odongo, EADB’s own former Kenya Country Manager, the very officer who had appraised and presented the project for board approval, appeared before High Court Judge Alfred Mabeya and recanted. He confirmed the loan was two-phased.

He confirmed the second tranche was for construction of the residential units. He confirmed that proceeds from food and beverage at the restaurant alone could not service the loan without the real estate component. And, most devastatingly, he said he could not explain why the second tranche was never disbursed. “I was not in senior management,” he told the court. In a related statement to the Directorate of Criminal Investigations, Odongo had confirmed that EADB’s board had approved both phases, including the additional Sh290 million for rehabilitation of structures and construction of demonstration villas.

He also told the court that the affidavit bearing his name that had been filed in the UK proceedings, the document that helped obtain the English judgment against Tuju, had not been sworn before a Commissioner for Oaths in the usual manner.

It was drafted by the bank’s lawyers, presented to him, and he signed it in good faith. Among the claims in that affidavit that he now said were not accurate: that Dari’s restaurant operations were generating revenues and profits sufficient to meet loan repayments without the construction component.

That is not a minor discrepancy. That goes to the heart of whether EADB obtained its landmark UK judgment on the basis of evidence that its own witness now admits was inaccurate. Tuju has since returned to London seeking a review of the 2019 ruling in light of this new testimony. But the Kenyan courts have already closed that door, citing res judicata and the principle that issues already determined cannot be relitigated. The bank’s argument, echoed by every court that has since ruled in its favour, is that this matter is settled. Finality of courts must be upheld.

The London Gambit: How EADB Armoured Itself Against Kenya’s Courts

There is a clause buried in virtually every facility agreement EADB signs with its Kenyan borrowers, and prospective clients should read it with the greatest care before putting pen to paper.

That clause specifies that disputes arising from the loan shall be resolved before the High Court of Justice in England, under English law, with the judgment to be registered and enforced in Kenya. For an institution whose mandate is to promote East African development, the choice of a London jurisdiction is remarkable.

It means that when things go wrong, the borrower, whether a small Ugandan transport company or a prominent Kenyan businessman, must fight their corner against a well-resourced multilateral bank in a foreign court whose daily operating costs in lawyers’ fees alone can dwarf the original loan.

EADB invoked that clause in December 2018 after years of correspondence with Dari Limited produced no payment. The case went before Judge Daniel Toledano of the High Court of Justice in London, who on June 19, 2019, granted summary judgment in EADB’s favour for USD 15,162,320.95, covering the outstanding principal, accrued interest, and penalties. Tuju’s appeal to the Court of Appeal in London, heard by Lord Justice Leggatt, was dismissed.

The UK judgment was then registered by Kenya’s High Court on February 13, 2020, and when Tuju challenged it all the way up through the Kenyan court system, the Court of Appeal in Nairobi reaffirmed it on April 20, 2023.

By that point, what had started as a USD 9.197 million loan had ballooned to the equivalent of Ksh1.9 billion, and depending on which party’s calculations you believe, the total exposure including continuing interest and legal costs may have reached Ksh4.5 billion by the time the auctioneers arrived.

A loan that began at roughly Ksh943 million had more than quadrupled through the mechanics of compound default interest, currency movements, London legal fees, and a decade of enforcement costs. No payment was ever made after that single October 2015 instalment.

The EADB Act that governs Kenya’s obligations to the bank was declared unconstitutional in March 2025 by a Machakos High Court judge, who found it allowed the Finance CS to channel public money out of the consolidated fund without parliamentary oversight or public participation.

The London jurisdiction clause is also where EADB’s status as an international organisation becomes most consequential for borrowers. Article 44 of the EADB Charter grants the bank immunity from legal process in its member states.

When Blueline Enterprises of Tanzania tried to execute an arbitration award against EADB’s bank accounts in the early 2000s, the Tanzanian Court of Appeal ultimately upheld the bank’s immunity, ruling that it enjoyed absolute immunity in the exercise of its lending powers, which is precisely the context in which a borrower would need to sue it.

A judge warned prospective counterparties in plain terms: secure an express written waiver of immunity before you engage. Most borrowers, dazzled by the prospect of development financing, do not.

Tuju has sought to test this immunity shield directly, filing a case at the East African Court of Justice challenging whether EADB’s blanket immunity is compatible with modern jurisprudence on the accountability of multilateral lenders.

That case would be the first time the regional court had been asked to examine EADB’s charter in this light, making it one of the most consequential institutional law proceedings in East Africa’s recent history.

The outcome remains to be seen. What is not in doubt is that immunity has functioned, in case after case, as a near-impenetrable shield for the bank and a near-insurmountable obstacle for anyone seeking redress against it.

The Auction: A Ksh4.5 Billion Debt Recovered at Ksh450 Million

On October 1, 2024, EADB auctioned the Ngong Road property that had been pledged by Dari Limited as loan security. Garam Investment Auctioneers, acting on behalf of the bank, conducted what it described as a competitive bidding process.

The winning bid was Ksh450 million, accepted from a company called Ultra Eureka Limited. Court papers filed subsequently reveal that Ultra Eureka paid the full purchase price and was issued with completion documents, including the transfer instrument.

By February 18, 2025, a certificate of lease had been issued in the company’s name. By March 2026, Ultra Eureka had charged the property to KCB Bank Kenya, meaning the asset had been refinanced within months of its purchase.

Tuju was incandescent. He argued, publicly and in court, that the Ksh450 million sale price bore no relationship to the true value of the asset. He noted that EADB was simultaneously claiming a debt of Ksh1.9 billion to Ksh4.5 billion, and that even the lower figure was more than four times what the auctioned property fetched.

At what price, exactly, were Knight Frank Valuers Limited, who conducted the valuation, placing the remaining assets? Tuju contested the valuation fiercely, and it was on the basis of that challenge that a temporary court injunction stopped the auction of the remaining properties, Entim Sidai Wellness Sanctuary and Tamarind Karen, until March 9, 2026, when Justice Josephine Wayua Mong’are of the Milimani Commercial Court struck out the amended plaint as barred by res judicata and set aside all interim orders.

Six days later, on March 14, the masked operatives arrived at Dari Business Park. Ultra Eureka, which had hired Lavington Security Limited to guard the premises from March 10, moved to take physical possession.

The police, specifically officers from the Rapid Response Unit, provided the muscle. No court order was shown to Tuju, despite his repeated requests on camera.

He was allowed neither to collect his personal belongings nor to protect the interests of the tenants and employees whose livelihoods depended on the businesses operating within the park.

The Judiciary, evidently stung by the optics, issued a clarifying statement on March 18 emphasising that the March 9 ruling had been delivered lawfully on grounds of issue estoppel and that the plaintiffs had since filed an appeal before the Court of Appeal.

It urged all parties to exercise restraint.

That plea for restraint came after the cameras had captured everything, after a former Cabinet Secretary had spent a night in the cold, and after dozens of workers had been locked out of their source of income in the early hours of a Saturday morning.

The Allegations That Will Not Die: Bribery, the DCI, and a Petition to the Chief Justice

No account of this dispute is complete without confronting its most explosive dimensions. Tuju, in a press conference outside the Supreme Court buildings after delivering a petition to Chief Justice Martha Koome on March 13, 2026, levelled an allegation that should send shockwaves through Kenya’s legal establishment.

He claimed that agents of a commercial court judge had approached him for weeks demanding a bribe of Ksh10 million in exchange for a favourable ruling. He said he refused to pay.

He said he instead chose to work with the Ethics and Anti-Corruption Commission. He did not name the judge publicly, but he was clear that the bribe demand preceded the adverse rulings he subsequently received.

These are unproven allegations. They are denied by the EADB. But Tuju made them in his own name, in public, outside the Supreme Court, with cameras rolling. He also recorded a formal statement at the Directorate of Criminal Investigations.

The DCI, it should be noted, has previously summoned Tuju, his children, David Odongo, and other EADB officials in connection with the same dispute, suggesting the criminal investigation dimension of this case is very much alive.

In the same press statement, Tuju applauded Justice Esther Maina of the Machakos High Court, who declined to dismiss a separate constitutional challenge to the EADB Act, allowing it to proceed to full trial.

That case had already yielded a devastating ruling in March 2025, when Justice Francis Rayola Olei declared Sections 2(1) and 2(2) of the EADB Act 2014 unconstitutional, finding that they allowed the Cabinet Secretary for Finance to channel money out of Kenya’s consolidated fund into EADB without parliamentary oversight and without the public participation required by Article 10 of the Constitution.

The judge ordered the Finance CS to produce records of all payments made to EADB since 2014, to be submitted to Parliament within sixty days. He also ordered the Auditor General to conduct a full audit.

Kenya’s Machakos High Court declared the EADB Act 2014 unconstitutional, finding it allowed the Finance CS to funnel public money out of the consolidated fund and into a multilateral bank without parliamentary oversight, accountability, or public participation.

Read that carefully.

Kenyan taxpayer money has been flowing into EADB since 2014 through a legal mechanism that a court has now found to be unconstitutional.

The bank whose charter grants it absolute immunity from judicial process in its own member states has been capitalised, in part, by public funds channelled in a manner that a Kenyan court has said violated the constitutional right to public participation.

The same bank then uses that capital to sue its Kenyan borrowers in London courts, obtain judgments that dwarf the original loans, and auction prime Kenyan assets to buyers whose acquisition prices bear little obvious relationship to market value.

At the East African Legislative Assembly in Arusha, a whistleblower petition filed by Peter Odhiambo of the Justice Alliance put additional allegations on the parliamentary record: board members clinging to seats for up to eighteen years, four times beyond what the EADB charter permits; allegations of insiders borrowing from the bank and sitting on the board that approves write-offs of the same loans; accusations that former Director General Vivienne Yeda leveraged her dual roles at EADB and as Kenya Power and Lighting Company chair to push dubious transactions.

Tanzanian EALA legislator Dr. Abdullahi Makawe told the assembly he had been served with an arrest warrant simply for speaking to the media after raising questions about the bank before the House. Whether those allegations are established or not, they describe an institution for which transparency has historically been an afterthought.

A Pattern Older Than Tuju: The Blueline Enterprises Precedent

Those inclined to view the Tuju affair as an aberration, a unique collision of political timing, personal financial misfortune, and legal bad luck, need only read the dossier on Blueline Enterprises Limited of Tanzania.

In March 1990, EADB advanced a loan of approximately USD 2.279 million in Special Drawing Rights to Blueline, a Tanzanian transport company, to finance the purchase of trucks, trailers, and haulage equipment for a petroleum logistics project serving Tanzania, Malawi, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and neighbouring states.

The project was exactly the kind of real-sector development financing that development banks are established to support. Blueline defaulted. EADB exercised its right to appoint a receiver-manager under the floating debenture.

Blueline obtained an ex parte court order restraining the bank and the receiver from taking over its business. What followed was more than two decades of litigation across multiple courts and jurisdictions.

The arbitrator, Mr. A.T.H. Mwakyusa, eventually awarded Blueline damages of USD 61,386,853 against EADB for losses allegedly occasioned by the bank’s conduct in the receivership. When Blueline commenced execution proceedings in 2006, a Tanzanian High Court allowed a garnishee order to attach EADB’s accounts at Standard Chartered Bank in Dar es Salaam. EADB invoked its immunity shield under Article 44 of its charter and the East African Development Bank Act.

The High Court dismissed the immunity plea, finding that a liquid bank account was not the type of asset that enjoyed immunity.

On appeal, the Court of Appeal reversed that finding in a landmark 2011 judgment, holding that EADB enjoyed absolute immunity from all forms of legal process arising out of the exercise of its lending powers, and declared all proceedings against the bank a nullity.

Blueline was left holding a USD 61 million arbitration award it could not enforce against an institution whose charter placed its assets beyond the reach of any court.

The member states of EADB declined to step in with taxpayer funds to satisfy the award. EADB emerged intact. Blueline did not.

The structural parallel with Tuju’s situation is striking. In both cases, EADB advanced a loan for a project that was supposed to generate revenues enabling repayment. In both cases, the borrower alleges that the bank’s own conduct in the transaction contributed to the default.

In both cases, the bank pursued recovery through courts and enforcement mechanisms that placed it at an overwhelming procedural advantage, while the borrower’s avenues for counterclaims against the institution were constrained by the immunity shield. And in both cases, the bank won.

The Broader Portfolio: Write-Offs, Bad Loans, and the Quiet Reckoning

EADB has, to its credit, openly acknowledged the toll its lending portfolio has taken. Its audited financial statements for the year ended December 31, 2023, revealed that the bank wrote off loans amounting to USD 13.03 million during the year, a dramatic escalation from the USD 140,000 written off in 2022. Those written-off assets, secured by landed properties including apartment blocks and land in various locations across the region, were being offered for sale.

The bank noted that the sale process was expected to take approximately one year and that the estimated sale values had been discounted to present value, meaning the assets were being marketed at figures below what the bank itself estimated they would ultimately fetch.

That is the institutional version of the discount at which prime properties disappear from borrowers’ portfolios.

At the time of reporting, Tanzania held the largest share of EADB’s gross loan balances at USD 72.83 million, representing 63 percent of the total. Uganda accounted for 28 percent at USD 33.03 million, with Kenya at six percent and Rwanda at three percent. Uganda had a non-performing loan balance of USD 1.02 million as of that reporting period. Kenya had resumed repayment of its loans after defaulting on a USD 5.2 million repayment in 2022. These are not the figures of a bank with a pristine lending record operating in a straightforward development environment.

They are the figures of a multilateral institution managing a complex and contested loan book across four jurisdictions, with a history of defaults, receiverships, and contested recoveries.

In 2024, EADB announced a significant policy shift, moving from dollar-denominated lending to local currency financing through currency swap agreements worth USD 90 million signed with Rwanda and Tanzania. The stated purpose was to eliminate exchange rate risks for borrowers and reduce the cost of loans.

That is a welcome and long-overdue reform. It is also an implicit acknowledgment that lending in US dollars to borrowers earning in Kenyan shillings, Tanzanian shillings, or Ugandan shillings created a structural vulnerability in every loan it originated, a vulnerability that contributed to defaults across its portfolio when exchange rates moved adversely.

It is a vulnerability that, in Tuju’s case, meant that a loan originally equivalent to Ksh943 million had, through interest, penalties, and currency movements, become a debt of Ksh1.9 billion to Ksh4.5 billion, depending on the calculation date.

The Warning Every Borrower Must Heed

This story is not, at its core, about Raphael Tuju. Tuju is the most visible casualty of an institutional structure that has, over decades, created conditions systematically unfavourable to borrowers across East Africa.

The combination of factors that define EADB’s relationship with its clients is worth stating plainly, because every prospective borrower walking through its doors deserves to understand what they are signing.

First, the dispute resolution clause. When you borrow from EADB, you agree that any dispute will be resolved in England under English law. You are consenting, in advance, to fight any grievance you have against a Kampala-headquartered institution in a foreign court thousands of miles from your business, your assets, and your country’s legal system. The cost of that fight, in London lawyers’ fees alone, can render a legitimate defence economically impossible.

Second, the immunity shield. Article 44 of the EADB Charter, interpreted by courts from Tanzania to Kenya, grants the bank absolute immunity from legal process arising from its lending activities.

If the bank’s conduct in relation to your loan contributes to your default, whether by refusing a second tranche, by introducing new collateral conditions, or by any other means, your ability to sue it for those actions is severely curtailed.

You can lose. It cannot. That is not a metaphor. It is the legal architecture within which EADB operates.

Third, the dollar denomination risk. Until 2024, every loan EADB advanced to East African borrowers was denominated in US dollars. If the shilling fell against the dollar during the life of your loan, your debt grew in local currency terms without any new borrowing. Tuju’s original facility of approximately Ksh943 million became Ksh1.9 billion in part because of this mechanism, compounded by default interest rates that the facility agreement permitted the bank to apply.

Fourth, the affidavit problem.

Evidence from the Tuju case shows that EADB’s own Kenya Country Manager signed court affidavits prepared by the bank’s lawyers in proceedings before the English court, affidavits that he subsequently recanted under cross-examination before a Kenyan judge.

The same affidavits were used to obtain the UK summary judgment that forms the foundation of the entire enforcement action against Tuju and his family. That a Kenyan court has repeatedly declined to give effect to this recantation, citing issue estoppel and res judicata, does not make the underlying factual problem disappear. It simply means it cannot be relitigated domestically.

Fifth, the valuation and auction mechanics. When EADB auctions a property to recover a debt, the valuation is conducted by a firm it appoints. The bidding process is managed by an auctioneer it appoints.

The first Dari property, Tamarind Karen and Dari Business Park, was reportedly sold for Ksh450 million against a debt the bank simultaneously valued at Ksh1.9 billion.

Whatever remained of that gap, after the auction proceeds were applied to the outstanding balance, continued to accrue interest. The remaining properties, Entim Sidai and the others, were next in line. If those too are sold at prices significantly below the bank’s stated debt, Tuju could lose everything and still owe money.

When a development bank’s own official recants the evidence used to obtain a foreign judgment, but the courts say that judgment can no longer be questioned, something has gone wrong with the system. The question is who pays the price. In this case, it is the borrower.

What EADB Says, and What It Does Not Say

In fairness to EADB, its position is not without foundation. Contracts, once signed, must be enforced. A development bank that let every defaulting borrower walk away on the basis of hardship stories would cease to exist as a viable institution within a decade. The English court, the Kenyan High Court, and the Court of Appeal have all examined the facts and found for EADB. That is not nothing.

The bank also makes a point that deserves to be taken seriously: it says it received no credible or verifiable repayment proposal from Dari Limited throughout the seven years of this dispute.

Tuju’s counter-claim, that he made multiple settlement offers including an immediate Ksh1.29 billion payment and a KCB refinancing proposal that would have cleared the debt in cash, has not been established to the satisfaction of any court. The bank says those offers were not verifiable.

Tuju says the bank refused to engage or issue a redemption statement. A decade of litigation has not settled this factual dispute to the satisfaction of the public, even if the courts have moved on.

But here is what EADB does not say, and what no court has compelled it to explain. It does not explain why the second tranche of Ksh294 million, the construction money without which the project was designed to fail, was never disbursed.

It does not address the recantation by its own Kenya Country Manager. It does not explain why the facility was originally denominated in a currency that would automatically inflate the borrower’s obligations as the shilling weakened.

It does not explain what a property valued at Ksh4.5 billion in outstanding debt was doing selling at the auction for Ksh450 million.

And it does not explain why, when the moment of enforcement came, it deployed masked operatives in unmarked vehicles in the middle of the night rather than the unambiguous production of court orders that the rule of law it purports to represent would seem to require.

The Reckoning

Tuju has appealed to the Court of Appeal. He has petitioned the Chief Justice. He has recorded a statement at the DCI. He has filed at the East African Court of Justice. He has returned to London seeking a review of the foundational judgment.

Every door he knocks on has, so far, been closed by the same combination of res judicata, issue estoppel, and the formidable procedural architecture that EADB has built around itself over decades. Courts do not easily second-guess other courts, especially foreign ones whose judgments have been formally registered. That is the system working as designed.

But behind the legal formalism, a set of questions that go to the heart of what development finance is supposed to be for remain stubbornly unanswered. EADB was created in 1967 to promote sustainable socio-economic development in East Africa through long-term lending to viable projects.

It is owned by the governments of Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, and Rwanda, capitalised partly by their taxpayers’ money, and endorsed by the African Development Bank, the Netherlands Development Finance Company FMO, and Germany’s DEG. It has won awards.

It has been rated. It has been celebrated. And yet the pattern that emerges from decade after decade of its lending record is of an institution that extends credit under contractual terms that systematically disadvantage its borrowers, pursues enforcement through foreign courts that most borrowers cannot afford to match, hides behind a charter immunity that places it above accountability, and auctions its way to recovery at values that bear no obvious relationship to the outstanding debt.

As for Tuju, he is outside his gates. His children, who signed as guarantors and whose properties are pledged as security, face the same enforcement machinery.

The Tamarind Restaurant that once served Karen’s moneyed classes has a new owner. The Entim Sidai Wellness Sanctuary is next. What was once a Ksh943 million loan, drawn in the full confidence that a development bank was a partner in a legitimate enterprise, has become the instrument of demolition of everything he built.

EADB calls it the rule of law. It calls it the finality of court orders. It calls it the inevitable consequence of a borrower who refused to pay.

Raphael Tuju, standing in the predawn dark outside the gates of his own business park, calls it something else entirely.

And the growing body of evidence from its loan book, its affidavits, its immunity battles, and its courtroom record across four countries and more than three decades suggests that this is not the last time East Africa will have this conversation about the bank that was built to develop the region and has become, for far too many of its clients, the institution that showed up in the night and took it all away.