Britam Risks Losing Billions As Court Rules In Favor Of Cytonn Over Unsubstantiated Fraud Claims

Back in 2014 Britam accused four of its former employees of theft of billions of shillings, to the tune of kes. 8 billion, and sought to file criminal complaints about them. Britam said that the theft was discovered after audits done by accounting firm KPMG and law firm Coulson Harney.

The four former employees refuted this claiming that no such theft had happened and wrote to Britam asking them to disclose the said reports to prove their innocence. Britam, however, refused to disclose the audit reports and the four former employees then filed a lawsuit in the high court in 2016 seeking to compel Britam to disclose the audits.

After three years of litigation, the judge ruled and ordered that indeed Britam must disclose the said audit reports if they are relying on them to allege theft by its former employees. Additionally, the judge found Britam’s conduct so unbecoming that it also slapped Britam with the penalty of refunding the accused former staff with the cost of the lawsuit.

Contacted for comment, our source at Britam says that the board is furious with the CEO, Benson Wairegi, why he filed frivolous lawsuits just for the sake of trying to kill competition from former staff. The new investors IFC and Swiss RE are apparently unhappy with Mr. Wairegi and want to see him fired by the end of the year.

The stock has tanked by over 75% since he lost his team to Cytonn and is now trading at below IPO price. Our sources tell us that the new investors, IFC, Swiss Re, and AfricInvest are frustrated because they’re sitting on paper losses, having bought the share price at kshs. 15 and now it is trading at below 9 bob.

When we contacted a source at Cytonn, she said that “all their games shall come to a sudden and painful end. We are going to go after them for billions of shillings for damages. They are the ones with really big legal issues. The judge was very clear in his ruling. And we can assure you, the so-called forensic audits don’t exist, they have just fixed themselves with their lies”

Sooner or later the market will realize that this is the biggest corporate lie ever perpetrated by a listed company to investors and in plain sight of regulators and international shareholders like IFC and Swiss Re.

Our investigative desk obtains the ruling below.