Missing man who held a county’s money hostage

Good evening. It’s Brian from The Kenyan Wall Street.

These are our day’s financial stories : 

Missing Ex-Finance Chief cripples Nairobi County payments

By Fred Obura

Nairobi County's finances ground to a halt over a bureaucratic requirement that assumed a departing official would actually show up to leave. The Central Bank refused to update the county's banking signatories because its rules require both the outgoing and incoming finance chiefs to appear in person, a problem when the outgoing one is currently a fugitive with an arrest warrant out on him. Governor Johnson Sakaja had already appointed and gazetted a replacement weeks earlier, but the county's accounts stayed frozen anyway, payments delayed, obligations at risk of default. The High Court finally stepped in and ordered CBK to recognize the new appointee without his predecessor's cooperation, ruling, essentially, that a fugitive doesn't get veto power over a county's ability to pay its bills.

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A wrong email invalidates a tax liability

By Brian Nzomo

A KSh18.55 million tax dispute is headed back to square one after the High Court found the Kenya Revenue Authority (KRA) couldn't explain why it stopped emailing appeal documents to the address a company had actually designated. UR Home International says it never saw the notices, the memorandum of appeal, or the hearing dates, and only found out about the case when KRA started trying to collect. The court's suspicions weren't helped by paperwork that referenced an entirely different company buried inside UR Home's own appeal file. Justice Rhoda Rutto set aside last year's judgment and sent the case back for a proper hearing, ruling that a company shouldn't lose millions because someone at KRA couldn’t get an email address right. 

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OPINION : The Risks in Kenya’s Public Revenue Securitization Dance

By Cuba Houghton

Kenya is preparing to borrow roughly KSh100 billion against future collections from its Affordable Housing Levy, the fourth major revenue stream converted this way in three years. The justification is a KSh118.3 billion financing gap in the housing program, a figure that, oddly, doesn't match Treasury's own budget numbers, which show a shortfall closer to KSh0.1 billion. That discrepancy matters because securitization keeps borrowing out of the budget books Parliament is supposed to scrutinize, and off the government's official debt count entirely, even though it binds future tax revenue just as tightly. Kenya has run this play before, with the Road Maintenance Levy and the Sports Fund, and each time the pattern is the same: money moves fast, oversight doesn't follow, and citizens lose their say over a tax's rate, duration, or existence for as long as the resulting bond has to be repaid.

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Heads Up

REGIONAL : Ebola’s Bundibugyo strain gets a vaccine

By TKWS Reporter

The University of Oxford and the Pandemic Sciences Institute have begun human trials for a potential vaccine that may provide protection against the Bundibugyo strain of the Ebola virus currently spreading within the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). The potential vaccine, called ChAdOx1 Ebola BDBV Vaccine (Recombinant), has been produced with similar technology to that used for the Oxford-AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccine. 

The one year study will divide 50 people into two groups, with Group 1 comprising 10 people who will be given a first dose and a six-month booster, while Group 2 will have 40 people who will receive either a single dose of the vaccine or a saltwater placebo. The development comes as the WHO and aid organisations warn of a growing risk of the outbreak spreading into South Sudan, after the confirmation of two cases in Wamba, Haut-Uélé Province, near the South Sudan border significantly heightened the risk of cross-border transmission.

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What You Should Watch! 

Offshore banking is one of the most misunderstood topics in Kenya. Some people think it's only for the ultra-wealthy, others assume it's about hiding money. So what's the truth? In this episode of the Just Money Podcast, Ivy sits down with Fredrick Oruka, Investment Advisor at I&M Capital, and Robert Ochieng, CEO & Co-Founder of Abojani Investment, to demystify offshore banking and offshore investing once and for all.

Yesterday’s Poll Results

Do you support the new CMA guidelines to expand ESG requirements in Kenyan companies?

🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 Yes (88%)
⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ No (12%)

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