Two men sit at opposite ends of the same money trail, and neither has explained, in the detail the public interest now demands, how it connects them.
Adil Khawaja chairs Safaricom, Kenya’s most powerful and most profitable company, and leads Dentons Hamilton Harrison & Mathews, the country’s oldest law firm. Ronald Karauri fronts SportPesa, the betting brand that just booked a record Sh330.5 billion in stakes in the year to June 2026.
Between them sits a small, previously obscure company called Commtech Consortium Limited, whose shareholding register has, at different points, carried the names of Khawaja’s own corporate lawyers and now sits inside the ownership structure of the betting empire Karauri still fronts but barely owns.
This is not a story about two isolated scandals happening to share a page.
It is a story about one vehicle, incorporated in March 2023, that has passed through the ownership chain of a Sh104.8 billion public health technology contract and emerged on the other side holding a quarter of Milestone Games Limited, the company operating SportPesa.
It is a story about what happens when the chairman of the country’s dominant telecom, mobile-money and now healthcare-technology partner also runs the law firm whose own staff have held shares in the vehicle sitting at the centre of both deals. And it lands at the exact moment Kenya’s newly created Gambling Regulatory Authority is deciding who gets to keep operating under a licensing regime nobody has fully tested.
The Ownership Wipeout Nobody at SportPesa Wants to Discuss
Start with the numbers, because they tell the starkest part of the story before a single conflict-of-interest question is even asked. In four years, Milestone Games Limited the SportPesa operating company has gone from majority Kenyan ownership to majority control by two entities registered in Ras Al Khaimah, a UAE emirate whose corporate registry keeps shareholders and directors entirely hidden from public view.
▪ Techglow Limited, a Ras Al Khaimah company with no known website, office presence or social media footprint, now holds 54 percent of Milestone Games the single largest shareholder.
▪ Commtech Consortium Limited holds 25 percent, having arrived from inside the ownership structure of Konvergenz Network Solutions, the technology firm building and leasing Kenya’s Social Health Authority digital platform.
▪ Robert Macharia, who built the original SportPesa operation, has been diluted from 71 percent direct ownership to 0.75 percent.
▪ Ronald Karauri, the CEO and public face of the brand for a decade of licence suspensions, tax wars and courtroom brawls, now holds roughly 3 percent directly.
Karauri still appears at industry events as SportPesa’s chief executive. He still speaks for the brand in the press. But the company he is publicly identified with is now, on paper, run for the overwhelming benefit of shareholders whose identities Kenyan regulators cannot verify.
White Hart Limited, linked to businessman Tom Waireri Thuo, holds 11.6 percent through a residual structure that also carries interests belonging to Macharia, Karauri and James Ngengi Muigai, a relative of former President Uhuru Kenyatta.
Everyone else at the table has been diluted into irrelevance while two anonymous foreign entities decide the direction of a company processing more money in a year than the entire Nairobi Securities Exchange saw from retail, foreign and high-net-worth investors combined.
The Lawyers Who Owned the Middleman
Commtech Consortium is the hinge on which this entire story turns, and its ownership history does not read like an accident. When it was incorporated in March 2023, the shares were held by Deborah Linet Ontiri and Peter Okaalet Jr not investors, not technologists, but lawyers at Dentons Hamilton Harrison & Mathews, the firm Adil Khawaja leads as managing partner.
Okaalet is a partner in the firm’s corporate, commercial and real estate practice. Ontiri is a senior associate working directly under him in the same department. A third name, Elvis Charo Kitsao, appeared on the filings as a director holding no shares.
At that time, Commtech held a 22.5 percent stake inside the Konvergenz ownership structure the same Konvergenz that, alongside Safaricom and UAE-registered Apeiro Limited, won the contract to build and lease the Sh104.8 billion digital platform underpinning the Social Health Authority.
Khawaja has confirmed publicly that his firm gave what he called preliminary advice to Konvergenz.
He has never said whether that advisory relationship extended to Commtech itself, the vehicle his own staff held shares in, and he has never clarified whether Ontiri and Okaalet were acting as independent investors or as nominees standing in for someone whose name does not appear anywhere on a public register.
A law firm advising a technology company on a state contract is one thing. A firm whose own lawyers simultaneously hold the beneficial face of a shareholding vehicle inside that same contract’s ownership chain is a different matter entirely.
Business Registration Service filings now list different names on Commtech’s register Dadson Wahagi Mugo with 80 percent and Elvis Charo Kitsao, the former non-shareholding director, with 20 percent.
Kitsao has separately appeared in materials connected to Khawaja’s long-running participation in the Rhino Charge, the conservation rally where Khawaja has fielded a high-profile team for years.
A change of names on a register does not answer the question that matters: who instructed the acquisition of Commtech’s original stake in Konvergenz, who funded it, and why did the people named on that stake sit inside the professional orbit of the Safaricom chairman whose firm was simultaneously advising the consortium partner Commtech had bought into.
The Vanishing Act: From SHA’s Health Platform Into a Quarter of SportPesa
Commtech’s 22.5 percent interest in Konvergenz did not stay put. Business Registration Service records show it moved to Starway Trading Limited, another company registered in Ras Al Khaimah, under a UAE legal framework that makes it impossible to confirm whether this was a genuine arm’s-length sale or an internal restructuring by the same beneficial owners moving assets into a jurisdiction that guarantees their invisibility. Almost simultaneously, Commtech resurfaces holding 25 percent of Milestone Games the SportPesa operating vehicle alongside Techglow’s 54 percent.
Two UAE shells, one exiting a state health contract and one arriving fresh into a betting empire, doing business with each other and with a company whose earlier shareholders sat inside the Safaricom chairman’s own law firm.
Nobody involved has explained where the capital came from.
The Business Daily reported it could not get comment from Commtech because phone numbers listed with the Business Registration Service went unanswered, and that emails to Konvergenz on the ownership changes went unreturned.
The uncomfortable arithmetic is this: Safaricom sits inside the SHA consortium building the health platform. Safaricom’s M-Pesa rails process the deposits and withdrawals that fuel the betting industry Milestone Games operates in.
And a vehicle that once carried the names of Safaricom’s own chairman’s law firm employees has passed directly between the two.
If regulators or journalists ever needed a single thread to pull to understand how state contracts, mobile-money dominance and betting profits intersect in today’s Kenya, this is it.
Safaricom’s Impossible Position
Strip away the individual names and the structural conflict remains just as stark. Safaricom is simultaneously a delivery partner on a Sh104.8 billion public health digitisation contract and the operator of the mobile-money infrastructure that the country’s largest betting company depends on to move money in and out of customer accounts.
Its chairman leads a law firm that advised a key partner in that same health contract. And employees of that firm have, at one point, held shares in a company sitting inside both the health contract’s ownership chain and the betting operator’s shareholding structure.
No Kenyan regulator has yet required Safaricom, Dentons Hamilton Harrison & Mathews, or Adil Khawaja personally to produce a full accounting of how these positions interact, who benefits from the advisory fees flowing to the firm, and whether the firm’s internal conflict-management policies were ever engaged when its own lawyers turned up as shareholders in a company doing business with a client the firm was advising.
Under Kenya’s professional conduct rules for advocates, a managing partner bears responsibility for how conflicts are handled inside the firm, whether or not he personally held a single share.
A Regulator’s Clock Is Now Running
The timing sharpens the stakes considerably. On 30 June 2026, the Cabinet Secretary responsible for gambling policy, working with the newly constituted Gambling Regulatory Authority, gazetted the Gambling Control (Licensing) Regulations 2026, operationalising the licensing regime created under last year’s Gambling Control Act.
Every operator licensed under the old betting law Milestone Games included was given a sixty-day transition window from the gazettement date to migrate onto the new regime, meaning that window is running right now, in the same month this ownership picture has become public.
The new rules have already triggered a fight of their own.
A High Court judge froze parts of the licensing regulations after a petition from a Nairobi lawyer who previously served as SportPesa’s business development director, arguing the steep new licence fees land-based renewal costs jumping from roughly Sh5,000 to Sh2.5 million, and online operator fees rising to Sh50 million were unfairly punitive.
Whatever the outcome of that petition, the underlying question for the Gambling Regulatory Authority does not go away: before it certifies any operator’s fitness to hold a licence under the new framework, has it established who actually stands behind the anonymous UAE entities now controlling nearly 80 percent of Kenya’s largest betting brand? A regulator cannot certify the character and suitability of shareholders it cannot identify.
The Tax Cut That Fed the Machine
None of this is happening in a vacuum of restraint. Kenya cut excise duty on betting stakes from 15 percent to 5 percent, a relief measure that coincided with punters placing a record Sh330.5 billion in the year to June 2026, a sum that dwarfed the roughly Sh145 billion that retail, foreign and high-net-worth investors put into the entire Nairobi Securities Exchange in the same period, even as the bourse delivered a 34 percent return.
The Kenya Revenue Authority still pulled in Sh16.5 billion in excise from the sector, beating its target by nearly 16 percent.
A GeoPoll survey found 64 percent of Kenyans had placed a sports bet in the previous year, ahead of Ghana and South Africa. Lighter taxes, heavier volumes, bigger returns for whoever sits at the top of the ownership pyramid and right now, that is two anonymous UAE companies and a vehicle with a documented history inside the Safaricom chairman’s professional circle.
A Pattern, Not an Anomaly
Kenya’s beneficial ownership register shows Khawaja’s commercial footprint stretching well beyond Safaricom and his law firm into Maasai Mara tourism camps sitting inside a live Environment and Land Court petition over wildlife-corridor encroachment, into CMC Motors and other automotive holdings, and, as beneficial ownership filings have separately revealed, into NMC Fertility Kenya Limited, the operator of a Nairobi clinic now facing reinstated High Court litigation over a donor mismatch and a separate case alleging a newborn was not the biological child of the couple who commissioned the surrogacy.
None of that proves anything about Commtech or SportPesa on its own. But it establishes a pattern worth naming plainly: a figure whose formal roles sit atop Kenya’s largest telecom and one of its oldest law firms also appears, repeatedly, at the edges of sectors betting, healthcare, conservation-adjacent tourism where beneficial ownership is difficult to trace and regulatory oversight has repeatedly been described by judges themselves as inadequate.
What Neither Man Has Explained
Ronald Karauri has never publicly addressed why he agreed to, or was powerless to prevent, the dilution of his stake in the brand he has fronted through a decade of licence wars, tax disputes and shareholder litigation, down to a residual holding while anonymous foreign entities took control.
Adil Khawaja has never addressed whether his firm played any role in structuring Commtech Consortium, whether Ontiri and Okaalet acted as independent investors or as nominees, or how a company with documented links to his firm’s staff came to occupy positions inside both a state health mega-contract and the country’s dominant betting operator.
Dentons Hamilton Harrison & Mathews has not issued a public accounting of the matter. Neither has Safaricom’s board.
Until one of them does, the plainest reading of the public record stands: a vehicle tied to the professional circle of the man who chairs Safaricom and leads its lawyers has ridden the same current from a Sh104.8 billion state platform into a quarter of Kenya’s largest betting company, while the two Kenyans who actually built that betting brand watch from single-digit stakes as a regulator’s licensing clock ticks down and nobody in authority has yet asked, out loud and on the record, who is really being paid.
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