The Nation Media Group (NMG) has been forced to apologise and delete an article that exposed a corruption scandal involving a company linked to former President, the late Daniel Moi.
The article which was written a year ago linking Mitchel Cotts to an irregular tender award by Kenya Ports Authority (KPA) for provision of storage for an extra 6,000 twenty-foot equivalent units of containers at the Nairobi Inland Container Depot (ICD).
Mitchel Cotts, NCBA Bank and Nairobi Inland Cargo Terminal (NICT) were awarded the tender without submitting a tender bid.
The Baringo County Senator Gideon Moi and NCBA Bank Chairman Mr. James Ndegwa were questioned by Directorate of Criminal Investigations (DCI) Economic Crimes Department on the matter in January 2020.
The tender scandals at ICD ultimately forced KPA Manging Director Daniel Manduku to resign in mid 2020.
Sources say NMG officially apologised, stating that they regretted the error made, citing inaccurate documents misled journalists to make wrong conclusions.
The peripheral cargo storage facilities at Embakasi in Nairobi were meant to store cargo which had overstayed at the ICD, reported to be a total of over 30,000 twenty-foot equivalent units (TEUs) containers at that time. The move is suspected to have been artificially instigated to rekindle hopes of the Standard Gauge Railway (SGR), whose cargo transportation business was not doing so well.
It is reported that after the decree was issued, container traffic on the SGR shot up by four times. The ICD could only handle 15,000 TEUs, hence this created another avenue for cartels to loot through construction of the peripheral cargo storage facilities. In order to address the congestion issue, KPA was allowed to lease Periphery Storage Facilities (PSFs) outside the ICD. Despite not being among the 30 companies that tendered for the contracts, Mitchel Cotts won the tender alongside Nairobi Inland Cargo Terminal, a company linked to little known Mr John Katiku.
Both Senator Moi and Ndegwa have shares in multiple layers of companies that own Mitchell Cotts – alongside Joshua Kulei, and other shadowy Kanu-era power brokers.
ALSO READ: Gideon Moi Questionned By DCI In New KPA Scandal
Others who have interests in the company include the widow of former Interior Minister George Saitoti and the family of former Cabinet Minister Simeon Nyachae.
NICT, on the other hand is owned by a company in which Philip Obandah Arunga has majority shares.
Arungah spent the whole of Wednesday answering questions from the DCI sleuths.
Kenyan Business Feed is the top Kenyan Business Blog. We share news from Kenya and across the region. To contact us with any alert, please email us to [email protected]