THE RUTO HAND IN TUJU’S FALL: How a President-Linked Petroleum Baron Walked Away With Sh3.5 Billion Karen Land for Sh450 Million

The Auction Nobody Noticed

On the morning of October 1, 2024, a day that will be remembered in Kenyan political history for the parliamentary theatre that stripped Rigathi Gachagua of the deputy presidency, a very different transaction was being concluded in the city’s commercial corridors. Officials of a company called Ultra Eureka Limited were finalising paperwork to hand over Sh45 million, a ten per cent deposit, to Garam Investments Auctioneers.

The object of their interest: a 6.8-acre leasehold in Karen, one of Nairobi’s most coveted postcodes, upon which former Cabinet Secretary Raphael Tuju had built a luxury commercial and wellness complex worth, by his own account, no less than Sh3.5 billion.

The full purchase price was Sh450 million.

By December 2024, Ultra Eureka Limited had cleared the Sh405 million balance.

By February 2025, it was registered as the new proprietor of a 99-year leasehold over land that hosts the Entim Sidai Wellness Sanctuary, Tamarind Karen and Dari Business Park. The buyer had acquired a trophy asset for less than thirteen cents on the shilling.

Ultra Eureka Limited is the sole property of Jackson Kiplimo Chebett, the dominant shareholder and board chairman of Stabex International Limited, one of Kenya’s fastest-rising petroleum marketing companies and a firm whose name has circulated for years in whispered conversations about the business interests of Kenya’s political class.

The Stabex-Ruto Shadow

Stabex International Limited was incorporated in 2009 and has since grown into a petroleum colossus with over 150 retail stations across Kenya and Uganda, twelve storage depots and annual sales volumes exceeding 300 million litres of fuel.

In the final quarter of 2025, the company commanded a 4.9 per cent market share in Kenya’s downstream petroleum sector, making it the fourth largest player in the industry behind Vivo Energy, Rubis and TotalEnergies.

In a sector long dominated by multinationals, Stabex’s ascent has been remarkable by any measure.

Registered ownership of Stabex places Jackson Kiplimo Chebett as the majority shareholder with 925,000 of the company’s one million ordinary shares. Abraham Kipkoech Korir, the director of projects and business development, holds 50,000 shares.

Stabex Group Chairman Jackson Kiplimo Chebett

The share register is thin, but the company’s trajectory is anything but: it has in recent years displaced established giants, won government-linked fuel supply contracts and expanded aggressively into landlocked markets in Uganda and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Since at least 2022, public discourse in Kenya has linked Stabex to President William Ruto, with allegations circulating across social media platforms and investigative blogs that the company operates as a proxy vehicle for presidential business interests.

The allegations first gained traction through posts by political blogger Robert Alai and were amplified by journalist Saddique Shaban, who specifically linked Stabex to a multimillion-dollar petroleum supply contract with the Kenya Defence Forces, characterising the company as a Ruto proxy operation.

The company has never publicly addressed the claims, and no formal legal proceedings have been brought to challenge the allegations. Company records do not show President Ruto or any member of his immediate family as a shareholder.

What is documented is the pattern of access.

In August 2023, Chebett held a meeting with Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni at which the latter personally committed to facilitating Stabex’s operations in Uganda by cutting through bureaucratic red tape.

That is not the kind of introduction a petroleum trader secures through ordinary commercial channels. It is the kind of introduction that flows from political architecture.

Chebett’s board at Stabex includes former Kenya Civil Aviation Authority Director Joseph Kiptoo Chebungei, a figure from the corridors of state.

Chebett is also the sole director and ultimate beneficial owner of Ultra Eureka Farm Limited, incorporated in 2002, which in turn wholly owns Ultra Eureka Limited, incorporated in 2018 and nominally classified as an agronomy and farming inputs enterprise.

It was this agronomy vehicle, carrying Chebett’s full chain of beneficial ownership, that walked into the Karen auction on the day of Gachagua’s impeachment and paid cash for Tuju’s life’s work.

The Debt That Swallowed a Dream

The origins of Tuju’s dispossession lie in a loan agreement signed a decade ago. In April 2015, Tuju’s company Dari Limited entered into a facility agreement with the East African Development Bank for a sum of nine point three million United States dollars, equivalent at the time to approximately Sh1.2 billion, though the figure has since ballooned with interest and penalties to over Sh4.5 billion in total claimed by EADB.

The purpose was to develop a thirty-room luxury retirement facility on the Karen land that Tuju had acquired in 2010 alongside the African Wildlife Foundation as co-tenant and over which he became the sole registered owner in December 2014.

Tuju maintains he was betrayed by the lender.

His case, aired across multiple courts on two continents, is that EADB failed to disburse the full loan amount, withholding what he says was Sh294 million in additional funding he had been promised, thereby frustrating the entire development model on which his repayment plan depended.

EADB has consistently denied this characterisation. In 2019, the High Court of Justice in England and Wales entered judgment against Tuju and ordered repayment of the debt. Kenyan courts recognised that foreign judgment in 2020.

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The Court of Appeal upheld the decision in 2023. Each time Tuju sought to arrest the momentum of enforcement, the courts turned him away.

By the time EADB instructed Garam Investments Auctioneers to proceed with the sale in October 2024, Tuju had exhausted most of his options.

The Supreme Court had in 2023 dismissed his appeal, and an extraordinary episode unfolded at the apex bench when all five judges on the panel recused themselves after Tuju lodged a complaint with the Judicial Service Commission accusing them of predetermination.

The recusal was dramatic but ultimately unhelpful to Tuju: the Supreme Court simultaneously declined to suspend the Court of Appeal decision, leaving EADB with a clear runway to enforcement.

The Registrar Who Looked Away

The sale itself, however contentious, might have been legally unremarkable had it not been for what happened at Ardhi House in the weeks that followed. Court records and affidavits filed in subsequent proceedings reveal a remarkable sequence: a valid court order barring the transfer of the Karen property was physically presented to the Ministry of Lands for registration, and an advocate instructed to log the injunction was told by officials that the order was not registrable because it contained no explicit instruction directed to the Chief Land Registrar.

The property was transferred to Ultra Eureka Limited on February 18, 2025, ten days after the court order had been extended for a third time on February 6, 2025.

The Chief Land Registrar at the time was David Nyambasa Nyandoro, a figure already enmeshed in his own legal battle for survival.

The Employment and Labour Relations Court had in May 2024 revoked his appointment and directed Lands Cabinet Secretary Alice Wahome and Principal Secretary Nixon Korir to replace him with Peter Mburu Ng’ang’a.

Nyandoro and the Attorney General appealed and secured a stay order in July 2024, allowing him to continue in office pending the appeal. It was therefore a man whose tenure was itself judicially contested who presided over the registration of a transfer that critics say was executed in contempt of court.

Busia Senator Okiya Omtatah, who is a respondent in the Nyandoro appeal, has since moved to introduce fresh evidence at the Court of Appeal specifically linking Nyandoro’s conduct in the Tuju transfer to his fitness for office.

Omtatah argues that Nyandoro, as the only officer in Kenya empowered to register property transfers, had a clear statutory duty under Section 68 of the Land Registration Act to register the court order inhibiting dealings with the parcel, once it was formally presented. To ignore it, he contends, was not a clerical oversight but deliberate contempt.

“That despite being fully aware of the said orders, the appellant knowingly, wilfully and deliberately disobeyed them and on or about 18th February 2025, proceeded to register an unlawful transfer of the said property in favour of Ultra Eureka, in contempt of the orders,” Omtatah states in his court papers, adding that Nyandoro also caused the title to be converted from L.R. No. 1055/165 to a new title, Nairobi Block 47/1399, under which Ultra Eureka Limited is registered as proprietor for a 99-year term.

Dawn Raids and Locked Gates

For nearly a year after the October 2024 auction, Tuju and his tenants continued to occupy the Dari Business Park and its associated premises. The legal machinery was still grinding, and successive injunction applications kept enforcement tentatively at bay. That equilibrium collapsed violently in the early hours of March 14, 2026.

Photographs and video footage broadcast nationally showed Tuju outside his own property at three in the morning as heavily armed police officers sealed off Dari Business Park along Ngong Road in Karen. The operation, executed under darkness with a show of state force that left observers unsettled, locked out Tuju and his associates and handed physical possession to Ultra Eureka Limited’s new security deployment.

Tuju spoke to journalists by phone, conveying a message to his children that became one of the most striking images of his unravelling ordeal.

Chebett’s version of events, filed in a replying affidavit before the High Court, records that prior to the dawn operation, the situation had already turned volatile. He claims that a group of more than fifty men forced their way onto the premises after the High Court lifted interim injunction orders, physically assaulting the security guards Ultra Eureka had deployed and injuring several of them before police were called to restore order. Tuju’s camp disputes aspects of this account.

The courts have now produced a fresh restraining order, this time freezing further transfer or assignment of the title pending the determination of Tuju’s application before the High Court.

That hearing is scheduled for April 7, 2026. Tuju has also lodged a parallel appeal at the Court of Appeal, meaning the battle for the Karen properties is far from concluded. In the meantime, Ultra Eureka Limited has charged the same title to Kenya Commercial Bank for a two point five million dollar loan facility, a move Tuju’s lawyers characterise as compounding the alleged contempt by encumbering land that remains under judicial dispute.

The Question That Will Not Go Away

The case against the Stabex-Ruto connection rests on inference, on the architecture of proximity. There is no documentary evidence placing President Ruto within the ownership chain of either Stabex International or Ultra Eureka Limited.

The Registrar of Companies records are unambiguous: Chebett controls both entities absolutely. What cannot be dismissed so easily is the political environment in which these transactions occur.

Chebett is a Kalenjin businessman from the Rift Valley, operating in a sector that is acutely sensitive to government goodwill, where fuel import licences, open tender system allocations and infrastructure access depend fundamentally on the disposition of the executive.

Stabex’s rise from incorporated startup in 2009 to fourth-largest petroleum retailer in Kenya by late 2025 is a remarkable commercial achievement that has coincided precisely with the arc of Ruto’s political ascendancy, from deputy president to president.

The company’s aviation fuel launch at JKIA in October 2024, attended by Energy Cabinet Secretary Opiyo Wandayi and Kenya Airports Authority chairman Caleb Kositany, was a statement of institutional embrace.

Tuju, for his part, is not simply a businessman who defaulted on a bank loan.

He is a senior political figure of the Raila Odinga era, a Luo politician who served as Cabinet Secretary under the Jubilee administration and who has since drifted to the opposition periphery.

The optics of a man from that political alignment losing a Sh3.5 billion property for Sh450 million to a businessman linked publicly to the presidency, through a process in which the Chief Land Registrar allegedly defied a court order, are not ones that any government eager to project rule of law should be comfortable inhabiting.

The Judiciary, through its communications office, has been unusually active in issuing public statements defending the chain of judicial decisions that culminated in Tuju’s eviction.

It has pointed to the 2019 London judgment, the 2020 Kenyan recognition of that judgment, the 2023 Court of Appeal upholding and the Supreme Court’s refusal of interim relief as an unbroken line of lawful process.

Justice Josephine Mongare, whose ruling of March 9, 2026 struck out Tuju’s latest suit as an abuse of process, found the case to be res judicata and a vexatious attempt to re-litigate a debt whose validity had been exhaustively determined. Her language was unsparing.

The legal analysis may be coherent.

The political symbolism is not so easily dissolved.

The Tuju affair is the story of a major transaction executed on the most politically charged day of Kenya’s recent history, by a company controlled by a man whose larger corporate vehicle has been publicly, if unproven, linked to the president.

It involves a land registrar who held office in defiance of a court order and who is alleged to have registered a property transfer in contempt of a judicial injunction.

And it ends, at least provisionally, with armed police locking a former Cabinet Secretary out of his own premises at three in the morning.

Those are not the hallmarks of an ordinary commercial debt recovery. They are the hallmarks of power.

Chebett did not respond to requests for comment beyond the affidavit filed in the High Court. Stabex International Limited did not issue a public statement on the Karen acquisition. The Office of the President declined to comment on the company’s alleged links to President Ruto.