Ukur Yatani kin fails in bid to access seized Sh60m
Former Treasury Cabinet Secretary Ukur Yatani.
A man alleged to be a kin of former Treasury CS Ukur Yatani has failed to convince the court to lift an order blocking him from accessing more than Sh60 million seized by the anti-graft body in March this year.
High Court judge Patrick Otieno dismissed the application by Mr Ibrae Doko Yatani, seeking to be allowed to access the millions in US dollars, for lack of merit.
The judge said the submission by Doko that he might lose a contract following the seizure of the money or that his company might be exposed to legal suits over the failure to perform a certain contract does not hold, because, in his view, the picture painted of Al Habib Enterprises Ltd was that of a thriving enterprise with huge cash flows and reliable financial contacts.
“The preserved sum is in the court's assessment a small fraction of the company’s worth incapable of crippling its operations. In any event, by the time the seizure was done, more than five months had lapsed since the tender award and the seizure cannot be singled out as the only reason for delay to commence the works,” said the judge.
The court allowed the Ethics and Anti-Corruption Commission to keep the $460,000 that was seized from Doko’s residence following a raid.
The businessman pleaded with the court to lift the order and allow him to access the money arguing that the freeze was obtained by misrepresentation of facts as there was no indication of any offence he is alleged to have committed.
He maintained that the money was genuinely earned by Habib Enterprises for trading with various public entities at the national and county levels and, therefore, not proceeds of crime.
Mr Doko said the raid ended in the seizure of phones, laptops, several documents and the money yet none of the things seized was connected to the allegations against the company.
He explained that he withdrew the money from an account operated in the name of Habib Enterprises Ltd at Al Habib National Bank of Kenya Ltd on diverse dates between November 6, and December 9, 2023, and he converted it to US dollars in order to cushion the firm from the depreciation of the shilling.
He added that part of the money was received from Springhills Estates Ltd which had agreed to advance to the company $600,000 towards the execution of the Kenya Rural Roads Agency (KERRA) project.
The businessman conceded that Habib Enterprises won a contract at Marsabit County government and was paid Sh66.3 million and not Sh71.7 million as alleged by the Commission.
He submitted that he should not be exposed to suffer loss and hardship on the flimsy ground that the commission needs more time to conduct investigations on matters and documents not specified.
According to the businessman, there was no connection between Habib Enterprises and Mr Yatani and that the personal documents found in his premises, which belonged to the former CS were in a luggage he had been given in Nairobi for delivery to Yatani in Marsabit.
The commission opposed the application arguing that the legal threshold for a preservation order is reasonable suspicion that the property was acquired by corrupt conduct.
The anti-graft body said it needed time set in the preservation order to carry out in-depth investigations by collecting several bank statements and scrutinising several documents collected to verify the authenticity of the position taken by the businessman, to establish if any other offences had been committed.
