New revelations as IEBC chicken scam agent’s bank accounts are frozen

Trevy James Oyombra, the man at the centre of a corruption scam involving British security printing firm Smith & Ouzman, may have bribed Kenyan election officials as late as last year, the Business Daily can now reveal.

Ethics and Anti-Corruption Commission (EACC) investigators seeking court orders to interrogate Mr Oyombra’s accounts in a local bank say in their application that some Sh20.5 million was transferred to Mr Oyombra’s account on May 23 last year.

Ignatius Wekesa, a forensic investigator at the EACC, says there is reason to believe that part of the deposit was intended to be paid to election officials in return for a tender he secured for Smith & Ouzman in the run-up to the March 2013 General Election.

The corruption watchdog told the court in its November 3, 2014 application that initial investigations had indicated Mr Oyombra’s accounts at Oriental Commercial Bank (OCB) were used as a conveyor belt for the transfer of bribes, codenamed ‘chicken’, from Smith & Ouzman to election officials.

“It has emerged that Mr Oyombra, jointly with others, benefitted from money remitted from the foreign company into these particular accounts,” says Mr Wekesa, adding that some of the money may have been paid to election officials as recently as last year.

“In view of the above facts, it is imperative that certain documents; being bank statements, account opening documents, banker books, mandate cards, swift transfer and any other documents that would enhance this investigation; be availed to us for investigation,” he said.

The court subsequently ordered that the bank provides the EACC with documents connected to Mr Oyombra’s account number 0070000862 in OCB’s Westlands branch.

The latest revelations about Mr Oyombra emerged from Nairobi’s Milimani Commercial Courts where the businessman has sued OCB, seeking to discharge his bank accounts from the freeze.

Mr Oyombra wants the freeze – imposed after the EACC sought and got court orders to interrogate his accounts – lifted on grounds that the directive only required the bank to co-operate with the investigators and not to freeze the accounts.

Oriental froze Mr Oyombra’s three bank accounts after it was served with an order from Nairobi’s Kibera Law Courts directing it to co-operate with the investigators.

READ: How UK sleuths unearthed Kenya ‘Chickengate’ scandal

PIC Centre, a firm owned by Mr Oyombra, is enjoined in the suit as the owner of two of the three frozen accounts.

Mr Oyombra says in court papers that he got to know of the bank’s decision to freeze his accounts on November 16, 2014 when he tried to withdraw money for an ongoing project in Kisumu.

“I was informed by the manager that OCB had frozen the accounts pursuant to a court order served upon them by EACC officers. I obtained a copy of the order only to realise that the warrant only authorised investigation. Nowhere did the court order any freezing of my accounts,” he says. Oriental is yet to respond to the petition Mr Oyombra filed last Friday.

Lady Justice Farah Amin directed Mr Oyombra to serve the bank with the suit papers so as to allow them time to respond.

The anti-corruption watchdog moved after the local media published stories on the trial in the UK of two senior Smith & Ouzman executives over charges of corruption committed in four African countries.

READ: Smith & Ouzman called its bribes ‘chicken’, court told

Detailed revelations of how the international bribery syndicate worked put the EACC and the Director of Public Prosecutions Keriako Tobiko under pressure to act on Kenyan conspirators.

Mr Oyombra has faulted Oriental for allegedly acting in excess of the court order by freezing PIC Centre’s accounts. The businessman argues that even if such an order were issued to freeze accounts, it could only apply to his personal accounts and not the company’s.

“Even if the order was for freezing my account, the same could not be extended to PIC Centre merely because I happen to be a director therein,” Mr Oyombra argues.

PIC Centre, a news agency, has two accounts with the bank, one dollar and one shilling denominated account.

Mr Oyombra claims that the firm is currently unable to pay its employees’ salaries and insurance premiums, a situation that has left the business in a vulnerable state.

Some of the workers have allegedly threatened to take legal action against the company over the unpaid salaries if it goes against their contracts.

The bank has allegedly imposed penalties to the frozen accounts for a number of cheques that have bounced following the freeze.

Mr Oyombra has attached the EACC application for the warrant and the orders issued by the Kibera court as proof that the bank has acted maliciously in freezing his accounts.

Mr Oyombra reckons that a meeting with some of the bank’s employees revealed that the freeze was a result of the negative publicity the lender feared it would face as a result of the investigations.

Mr Oyombra further claims that he was denied a meeting with the bank’s manager after he obtained a copy of the court orders, forcing him to immediately instruct his lawyer to seek legal redress.

Samuel Omondi, the lawyer representing Mr Oyombra in the case, says he secured a meeting with four Oriental employees, who informed him that the bank’s management made the decision to freeze the accounts over fears that the institution’s name would be tarnished by the investigations.

“The staff confirmed that the accounts were frozen courtesy of instructions from Oriental’s board of directors purportedly on account of the fact that I had been adversely mentioned in the media as having been involved in bribery of IIEC [Interim Independent Electoral Commission] officials and that the same reflects negatively on the bank.”

Mr Oyombra says he uses one of the account to cater for his family and to run his businesses and that all his affairs have been crippled by the lack of access to his account. He is yet to insure his two daughters, and that the pending premiums amount to Sh638,000.

Mr Oyombra further claims that he owes a contractor running his Kisumu construction project a quarterly fee of Sh10.5 million and that failure to pay may stall the project at a critical stage and occasion him heavy losses.

Mr Oyombra, a former Electoral Commission of Kenya (ECK) official, is accused in the ongoing corruption case in a UK court of acting as the conduit through which Smith & Ouzman funnelled bribes to senior election and Kenya National Examination Council officials.

The bribes were allegedly paid to win multi-million-shilling security printing contracts – some of which were single sourced.