Parliamentarians will start fresh investigations into the alleged irregular trading of the National Social Security Fund (NSSF) bonds that was flagged by the Central Bank of Kenya (CBK) about 16 months ago.
The National Assembly’s Committee on Finance and National Planning says its scheduled meetings with the CBK and the Capital Markets Authority (CMA) were disrupted by other urgent government matters, including the budgeting process and the vetting of the Principal Secretaries (PS) last year.
“We had a first meeting with the Central Bank of Kenya but we will have to start again from scratch because now you know it is something I regret because our committee had to finalise on so many things and so sometimes we get caught up by time but I will make sure we conclude the process,” the committee’s chairman and Molo MP, Kimani Kuria, told Business Daily in a telephone interview on Tuesday.
“What happened is that we got caught up in our schedules with the budgeting process but it is something we want to embark on once we come back from recess because you know we started then the budget process kicked in and now that becomes urgent and then the moment we finished the budget we embarked on the vetting of the Principal Secretaries and then we went on recess.”
Mr Kuria said investigation into the suspicious bond trade will be the priority for the lawmakers after the regular sittings of the National Assembly resume on February 10, 2026.
“What now we have agreed it’s (investigations) one of our first agenda once we resume from recess. The moment we are done with this Safaricom divestiture thing then we go back to the issue of NSSF bond,” said Mr Kuria.
The Committee says more stakeholders will face investigations on the role they might have played in the irregular trading of the NSSF bond, including CMA, NSSF fund managers, brokers and other market players suspected to have been involved in the bond syndicate that is claimed to have involved "very powerful" people.
CBK raised the alarm of the suspicious bond trades in August 2024 and asked the CMA to investigate the transactions between some brokers and market players terming the trading carried out between May and July 2024 as "illegal".
Under the deal, a fund manager was accused of buying bonds for NSSF at prices higher than the market average and in some instances sold the government paper at lower rates and buying the same bonds at higher prices in a few days.
The trades are suspected to be designed to generate illegal profits for the participants.
The NSSF outsources the management of most of its assets to various fund managers and invests the rest internally. The central bank’s letter to CMA mentioned Humphrey Wachira Gichuru and a freshly licensed investment bank by the name of Pergamon Investment Bank as parties of interest in the investigation.
The committee in early September 2024 summoned CBK Governor Kamau Thugge and CMA chief executive Wycliffe Shamiah to shed light on the alleged impropriety in the bond transactions involving two Central Securities Depository (CSD) accounts of NSSF, those of an individual and a local commercial bank.
But the summons failed and the committee went quiet on the inquiry.
In March last year (2024) the committee interrogated CBK over the matter before the subsequent sittings were disrupted by other government matters related to budgeting and vetting of principal secretaries.
CMA chief executive Wycliffe Shamiah said in 2024 that the investigations into the bond trade irregularity were ongoing and that a team had been assembled to execute the task.
But the investigations went quiet with CBK saying it is yet to hear from CMA after raising the alarm of suspicious bond trades in August 2024.
The committee was expected to present a report of its investigations to the house in the first week of February last year (2025) on the alleged irregular bond dealings.
CMA had earlier reckoned that the leaking of the August 19, 2024, letter affected the inquiry and denied investigators the chance to swiftly seize mobile phones, computers and laptops from the suspects.
