A Judge, A Tycoon, And a Village: How Mohamed Jaffer’s Alleged Courtroom Alchemy Now Threatens 50,000 Mombasa Residents

MOMBASA, Kenya — In a nation that has grown wearily accustomed to spectacular impunity, Mohamed Hussein Jaffer has long occupied a category of his own. The 78-year-old patriarch of the MJ Group, whose commercial footprint at the Port of Mombasa is without precedent among private individuals, now finds himself at the intersection of two explosive scandals simultaneously: a criminal investigation into the importation of 60,000 tonnes of condemned petrol aboard the tanker MT Paloma, and fresh allegations that he deployed a proxy company to seize ancestral land from an elderly Mombasa resident and thousands of his neighbours, with the alleged connivance of an Environment and Land Court judge.

The land story concerns ELCC 67/2021, a case filed in the Mombasa Environment and Land Court in which elderly resident Juma Abdalla Munyau Kathenge and his co-petitioner Asma Ndugu Juma accused Mayport Company Limited of unlawfully acquiring their prime Mombasa plot.

The case finally concluded in March 2026 with a judgment delivered by Justice Lucas Naikuni, currently stationed in Kwale, in which he declared Mayport Limited the lawful and registered proprietor of Subdivision Number 6234, Original Number 5220/4, Section I Mainland North, CR No. 20722, and issued a permanent injunction barring the petitioners and any persons acting under them from entering or interfering with the property. The outcome has sent shockwaves through a community whose survival hangs on the same parcel of ground.

The stakes could not be more staggering. Activists and community representatives say more than 50,000 residents of Mombasa face eviction and the demolition of their village following the ruling.

The land, estimated to be worth Ksh 15 billion, had been described by the petitioners as ancestral land held by generations of coastal families who had occupied it in good faith for decades.

THE PROXY STRUCTURE

Corporate registry documents examined by Kenya Insights establish that Mayport Company Limited was incorporated on February 9, 2012, as a private limited company with a nominal share capital of Ksh 100,000.

The firm’s two directors, who are also its shareholders, are Shaniz Chatur, identified in court filings as a former legal adviser at Grain Bulk Limited, one of Jaffer’s flagship companies, and Yakatali Amirali Lamuwalla, described as a personal assistant to Mohamed Jaffer himself.

The directorship structure is what legal experts describe as a signature Jaffer arrangement: valuable assets held in the names of employees and associates, insulating the principal from direct liability while ensuring operational control.

Chatur’s prior role at Grain Bulk Limited, the company that anchored Jaffer’s port logistics empire for three decades, establishes an institutional link that the petitioners’ lawyer argued should not be dismissed as coincidence.

Lamuwalla’s status as Jaffer’s personal assistant removes even the pretence of arm’s length ownership.

“This is a case we already knew the outcome. The tycoon has never lost any cases, especially within the Mombasa court.” — Harrison Charo, Justice For All

Equally damaging was the conduct of the two Mayport directors during the hearing itself.

According to court records reviewed by this publication, neither Chatur nor Lamuwalla produced the original title deed for the disputed land, nor were they able to furnish payment documents establishing that the property had been legitimately purchased from the petitioners.

Senior High Court counsel Steve Ogola, who represented the petitioners, drove the point further by raising a procedural irregularity that lies at the heart of the fraud allegations: the sale agreement for the land had been prepared not by the seller, as the law requires, but by Advocate Oloo, a lawyer who is described in court proceedings as having links to Mohamed Jaffer and who was simultaneously acting for the purported purchaser.

The implication of this arrangement is legally significant. Under Kenyan conveyancing practice, the preparation of a sale agreement by a lawyer acting for the buyer, rather than the seller, is a recognised red flag for fraud, suggesting that the transactional documentation was manufactured to support an acquisition rather than to memorialise a genuine sale.

Ogola put the question directly to the two directors in court. Neither provided a satisfactory answer.

THE JUDGE AND HIS DELAYS

What makes the case more troubling than the proxy structure alone is the conduct of the proceedings. Justice Naikuni adjourned the delivery of judgment in ELCC 67/2021 more than ten times over the life of the case.

Those delays, now a matter of public record, drew intense scrutiny from community advocates and legal observers who noted that the case had been fully argued and was awaiting only the judicial pronouncement.

Court records show that Justice Naikuni, then based in Mombasa, had on multiple earlier occasions cited his caseload as the reason for postponements.

One previous adjournment in September 2025, saw the judge personally apologise to the parties for what he acknowledged had become an unreasonable delay, telling them: “I understand that the continuous delays have been frustrating for all parties involved.”

He scheduled judgment for October 17, 2025, then failed to deliver it on that date. The ruling was eventually handed down on March 13, 2026, the digital seal on the judgment confirming the date and time as 10:06:37 hours. The judgment was delivered remotely, through Microsoft Teams, signed and dated at Mombasa.

Harrison Charo, Executive Director of Justice For All, a Mombasa-based civic organisation that had monitored the proceedings, was unsparing in his assessment of the outcome.

The judgment, he told this publication, was not a surprise. “This is a case we already knew the outcome. The tycoon has never lost any cases, especially within the Mombasa court,” he said. Charo’s words carry particular resonance against the backdrop of a national conversation about judicial corruption that has only intensified in recent months.

The court awarded the petitioners a nominal Ksh 6 million against the Chief Land Registrar for misfeasance and negligence in maintaining the land register, a sum that community representatives dismissed as insulting against the backdrop of a 50,000-person displacement and a Ksh 15 billion property claim.

Justice Naikuni ordered each party to bear its own costs and directed the Chief Land Registrar to file a compliance report within 60 days confirming rectification of the register in line with his orders.

THE WIDER JUDICIAL PATTERN

The Mayport case does not exist in isolation. It forms one chapter in a long dossier of litigation involving Mohamed Jaffer and Kenyan courts that has consistently raised questions about institutional capture and the commercialisation of judicial outcomes.

In one of the most documented episodes, Jaffer’s company Miritini Free Port Limited was found by Mombasa High Court Judge Eric Ogola to have irregularly received Ksh 1.475 billion in SGR land compensation from the National Land Commission in December 2015.

Justice Ogola’s 2020 ruling established in forensic detail how the Commissioner of Land had cancelled survey plans belonging to genuine squatters, consolidated their plots into a single parcel designated MN/VI/4688, and allocated the consolidated title to a company called Miqdad Enterprises, which then sold it to Miritini Free Port.

The judge found that the NLC had been aware of the squatters’ prior claims yet proceeded with acquisition and compensation without regard for their interests.

“This court cannot allow this kind of corruption for rewards to individuals who can bribe their ways to obtain taxpayers’ money at the expense of genuine needy Kenyans,” Justice Ogola declared.

Miritini Free Port then did something that became emblematic of the Jaffer litigation playbook: it filed a constitutional review petition seeking to set aside Ogola’s ruling.

The resulting proceedings dragged on for years before the Mombasa High Court under Justice Olga Sewe, whose repeated failures to deliver a ruling in that case attracted their own scrutiny. Sewe cited, at various hearings, her court’s sitting schedule in Kwale, incomplete preparation, assignment to a three-judge bench, and official duties in Nairobi as reasons why the ruling was not ready.

The matter had failed to reach resolution at least six times by the time it emerged in the public record in 2024, allowing the money to remain unrecovered while the legal merry-go-round continued.

Jaffer’s associates were heard boasting: ‘We know the system.’ In the corridors of Mombasa, that phrase is not interpreted as legal brilliance. It is shorthand for something uglier.

Then there is ATTA Kenya Limited versus Grain Bulk Handlers Limited, case number E30/2020, in which ATTA accused Grain Bulk of illegally auctioning 13,000 metric tonnes of its wheat stored at the company’s Mombasa silos, valued at Ksh 730 million.

Mombasa High Court Judge Florence Macharia presided over the proceedings, during which Grain Bulk’s legal representatives twice failed to appear.

On one occasion, the firm’s lawyer was reported to have fabricated the death of a relative as an excuse for non-attendance.

Judge Macharia warned the firm in open court that one more adjournment would result in judgment being entered against it.

The case was eventually dismissed in Jaffer’s favour, an outcome that provoked considerable public debate given the procedural history of the proceedings.

Further clouding the picture is an older case, Petition 17/2018, involving a claim of Ksh 1.8 billion against companies linked to Jaffer, and HCCE025/2020, a Ksh 90 million claim by Mombasa Maize Miller against Grain Bulk Limited. Both cases remain unresolved within a legal system whose pace, critics argue, disproportionately benefits well-resourced defendants who can afford to run out the clock.

In the commercial arena, Jaffer’s capacity to prevail in court reached its most spectacular expression in June 2025, when the Supreme Court, in a ruling hailed by his associates as a decisive triumph, nullified the Kenya Ports Authority’s award of a Sh5.8 billion grain handling facility contract to Portside Freight Terminals Limited, a company linked to former Mombasa Governor Hassan Joho’s family.

A five-judge bench led by Deputy Chief Justice Philomena Mwilu declared that the KPA had violated constitutional procurement procedures, preserving Jaffer’s Bulkstream Limited in its exclusive position at the port.

The ruling overturned a Court of Appeal decision that had cleared the way for the competing facility, restoring a three-decade commercial monopoly that rivals had described as suffocating.

It was in the context of that Supreme Court victory that a remark made within Jaffer’s business circle attracted widespread condemnation.

As Kenya Insights reported in January 2026, associates linked to the tycoon were heard boasting within hours of a High Court order that had paused a multimillion defamation suit brought by the Joho family: “We know the system.”

The remark, which spread rapidly through legal and business networks in Mombasa, was not read as confidence in the rule of law.

It was read, as this publication noted at the time, as shorthand for something uglier: the belief that outcomes can be managed, that delay is a commodity, and that some men are simply too rich to lose.

THE FUEL SCANDAL: A CRISIS ENGINEERED?

Against this background of courtroom controversies, the MT Paloma scandal has arrived with the force of a reckoning. On March 27, 2026, the tanker docked at the Port of Mombasa carrying 60,200 metric tonnes of Premium Motor Spirit imported by One Petroleum Limited, a company whose shareholder register lists Mohamed Jaffer, his sons Mujtaba, Ali Abbas, and Mohamed Husein Jaffer, as well as Mbaraki Holdings Limited, a Mauritius-registered entity whose offshore structure investigators note is commonly used to obscure beneficial ownership.

The cargo was found to contain sulphur levels four times above the limits permitted under Kenyan standards. It also failed tests for manganese and benzene concentrations. Despite these failures, the consignment was discharged into the Kenya Pipeline Company’s storage network over the Easter weekend, its movement facilitated by a waiver granted on March 28, 2026, by Trade and Investments Cabinet Secretary Lee Kinyanjui, whose letter acknowledged that the fuel contained high levels of manganese, sulphur and benzene. The letter authorised commingling the sub-specification fuel with existing pipeline stock to dilute the contaminants.

Energy and Petroleum Cabinet Secretary Opiyo Wandayi announced on April 7, 2026, that he was ordering the immediate withdrawal of the consignment from the market, declaring that it had been illegally imported outside the government-to-government framework.

One Petroleum, in a statement issued hours later, confirmed it would comply but maintained that the importation had been authorised through a legitimate emergency procurement process, noting that it had been one of four firms that responded to an emergency request issued by the Energy Ministry in March following the disruption to Gulf supply caused by the closure of the Strait of Hormuz by Iran.

By the time Wandayi issued his order, the fuel, according to multiple industry executives who spoke to Kenya Insights, had already been absorbed into the pipeline.

The Kenya Pipeline Company’s system does not segregate cargo by importer once product enters the network, meaning that the condemned consignment had effectively become untraceable. The withdrawal order, as this publication reported on April 8, had arrived too late to be meaningful.

Three senior government officials have since resigned: Petroleum Principal Secretary Mohamed Liban, Kenya Pipeline Company Managing Director Joe Sang, and Energy and Petroleum Regulatory Authority Director-General Daniel Kiptoo.

Energy Ministry Deputy Director Joseph Wafula and KPC Supply and Logistics Manager Joel Mburu were taken into custody and charged. The Directorate of Criminal Investigations has launched a probe spanning multiple jurisdictions and has initiated mutual legal assistance requests with foreign investigative agencies to trace the cargo’s origin and ownership chain.

Narok Senator Ledama Ole Kina, appearing before the Senate Energy Committee, named Jaffer, Mburu, and Wafula as the central figures in what he described as an engineered fuel shortage designed to create the conditions for a lucrative non-G2G import. Ole Kina’s timeline is damning: a National Security Council Committee meeting on March 9, chaired by Chief of Staff Felix Koskei, was convened to address the Iran-driven supply disruption; within sixteen days, an emergency import authorisation had been signed by PS Liban; two days after that, MT Paloma docked in Mombasa with a vessel that had no prior track record of importing Premium Motor Spirit into Kenya. The tanker had been diverted from an original destination of Angola after One Petroleum acquired the cargo in a ship-to-ship transfer off Fujairah in the UAE.

All the evidence, Ole Kina argued, pointed to a scheme in which the emergency was not merely exploited but deliberately manufactured. Jaffer has denied wrongdoing and his company has insisted the importation was legitimate.

No criminal charges have been filed against him in connection with the fuel matter. All allegations remain subject to investigation and court proceedings and have not been finally adjudicated.

THE LSK SPEAKS

Into this accumulation of controversies has stepped the Law Society of Kenya, whose newly elected council has adopted an unusually confrontational posture toward judicial misconduct.

In a formal statement, the LSK called on judges facing serious corruption allegations to voluntarily suspend their judicial duties or face heightened public scrutiny, describing this as both an ethical imperative and an institutional necessity.

The council announced the establishment of a confidential reporting mechanism allowing advocates to flag judicial misconduct, and pledged to file litigation to enforce accountability and to participate as a party in cases where prima facie evidence of wrongdoing exists.

The LSK also condemned what it described as the practice of using judicial transfers to shield incompetence or corruption, demanding that the Judiciary publish all transfer decisions together with their stated rationale. The statement followed the publication of the 2025 National Gender and Corruption Survey by the Ethics and Anti-Corruption Commission, which found that 5.5 percent of all judicial interactions in Kenya involved the payment of bribes, a figure that legal practitioners described as a conservative undercount of a problem that pervades every tier of the court system.

Justice Naikuni, who delivered the Mayport ruling in the Mombasa land case, has not responded to requests for comment. His name appears in recent court seal records as a sitting judge of the Mombasa Environment and Land Court, currently posting in Kwale.

His inclusion in stories published on local blogs, which first raised questions about the Mayport judgment and its connection to Jaffer, has not attracted a public response from the Judiciary.

WHAT THE COMMUNITY FACES

For the 50,000 residents whose futures were adjudicated in a remote hearing on Microsoft Teams on the morning of March 13, 2026, the legal architecture of the case is a secondary concern. What they face is eviction.

Their homes, built over decades on what they understood to be community land, now sit on property the court has declared to belong to Mayport Company Limited.

Mayport’s directors, both of them employees or personal staff of Mohamed Jaffer, hold the title. The elderly petitioner Juma Abdalla Munyau Kathenge, who spent five years pursuing justice through a court that adjourned his case more than ten times, was awarded Ksh 6 million in nominal damages against the Chief Land Registrar and told to pay his own costs.

The case now enters its appeal phase, with community advocates indicating they will challenge the ruling. But the appeals process in Kenya’s Environment and Land Court structure has its own reputation for delay, and Mayport’s ownership of the title remains in force pending any application for stay of execution.

The community has 30 days from the date of judgment to file an appeal before the Court of Appeal.

Mohamed Jaffer, through his companies, controls port infrastructure that moves a substantial portion of Kenya’s food and fuel supply. He has been honoured by President William Ruto at a state ceremony. He has survived decades of litigation, criminal inquiries, and regulatory scrutiny. He has, as his associates reminded anyone willing to listen following a procedural victory in January 2026, long insisted that he knows the system.

The question that Kenya now confronts, as detectives count the contaminated petrol molecules coursing through its pipelines and as 50,000 families contemplate homelessness on the margins of Mombasa, is whether the system, at last, also knows him.