City Lawyer Kimani Wachira Caught Up In Bribery Web Fights Claims

When the Ethics and Anti-Corruption Commission descended on Entim Sidai Wellness Sanctuary in Karen on the afternoon of March 9, they were not breaking up a routine legal consultation. They were, according to investigators, dismantling a scheme in which a Nairobi advocate, a defrocked former judge and two associates had arrived at the home of a desperate litigant to collect a bribe worth USD 80,000 in cash. The litigant, former Cabinet Secretary Raphael Tuju, had just lost a High Court ruling that cleared the way for the seizure of his most prized Karen properties. His morning had been catastrophic. His afternoon would bring down an advocate named Kimani Wachira.

Wachira, an advocate of the High Court holding a Master of Laws from the University of Nairobi, now finds himself at the centre of one of the most sensational judicial corruption cases Kenya has produced in years. He has fought back with characteristic aggression, instructing his own lawyers to fire off a demand letter to the EACC accusing the commission of entrapment, threatening a constitutional petition, and demanding a public apology. But the facts on the ground, including the Sh1 million in cash that changed hands at the meeting, the identity of his co-accused, and the explosive confession allegedly made by former judge Joseph Mutava to EACC investigators, make his defence a remarkably difficult sell.

The EACC confirmed the arrests the same evening they occurred, stating that Wachira, Mutava, city auctioneer and Kitui politician Dr. Kennedy Ngambau Mulwa, and a businessman named Tom Awili had been taken into custody at the Integrity Centre Police Station. The commission’s statement was precise and damning: the four had allegedly demanded USD 80,000 to influence the outcome of a commercial dispute before the High Court. All four were released on a cash bail of Sh200,000 each the following morning. The matter has since been forwarded to the Director of Public Prosecutions for review.

The defence Wachira has constructed rests almost entirely on a statutory declaration sworn on March 23, 2026, by Awili, who was himself among those arrested. Awili insists that when Tuju reached into his bag at the start of the meeting and produced Sh1 million in cash, he did so without any solicitation whatsoever. According to the declaration, the money was a facilitation fee owed to Awili for introducing the lawyers to Tuju, not a bribe destined for any judicial officer. Wachira’s legal team has seized on this account, arguing that their client acted strictly within his professional duties and never sought a single shilling from anyone.

The version strains credulity on several grounds. First, Wachira’s own explanation of how he came to attend the March 9 meeting reveals a pattern of urgency that sits awkwardly with the portrait of an innocent professional going about his lawful business. According to Awili’s declaration, Tuju had been frantically calling on the morning of March 9, immediately after Justice Josephine Mongare delivered her ruling striking out his amended plaint in the Dari Limited matter as a blatant abuse of process. The meeting at Entim Sidai was convened in direct response to that ruling. The question of why Tuju, in that state of panic, would produce a million shillings in cash at a first substantive legal consultation, and place it on the table before any discussion of fees had been concluded, has not been answered by Wachira’s team.

Second, and more damaging, is the man Wachira was sharing that meeting with. Former High Court judge Joseph Mutava is not a peripheral figure in Kenya’s corruption landscape. He was removed from the bench in 2016 following a tribunal that found him guilty of gross misconduct, a finding upheld by the Supreme Court in 2019. Among the matters examined during those proceedings were his dealings with notorious businessman Kamlesh Pattni, who has spent decades at the centre of Kenya’s most brazen corruption scandals. A seasoned advocate who holds advanced legal qualifications, who positions himself as a corporate law specialist, chose to attend an emergency legal consultation alongside a man the Supreme Court had declared unfit to serve on the Kenyan bench. That choice demands an explanation that Wachira has not provided.

The third and most explosive dimension of the case is what Mutava is alleged to have told EACC investigators after his arrest. Former Law Society of Kenya president and Senior Counsel Nelson Havi, a man who cannot be easily dismissed as a crank, placed on public record through his verified social media accounts the following claim: that Mutava had confessed to investigators that the money being solicited was destined not for his own pocket, but for Justice Josephine Mongare, the very judge who had delivered her ruling against Tuju earlier that same day. Havi went further. He alleged that one of the four men arrested had told investigators that he had fathered a child with the judge and was acting on her behalf.

Those allegations have not been confirmed by the EACC in any public statement. Havi has made them as a named Senior Counsel on a verified platform, and his standing at the Kenyan bar means the claim carries weight that anonymous social media commentary does not. The Judicial Service Commission has issued no statement. Justice Mongare, who continues to sit in the High Court’s Commercial and Tax Division at Milimani, obtained conservatory orders on March 19 blocking investigations against her, and has denied all allegations of wrongdoing. The Chief Justice’s office has said nothing.

Into this extraordinary context Wachira inserts himself as a victim. His lawyers describe the EACC operation as procedurally unfair and an abuse of process, and have warned of constitutional litigation if the commission does not halt its investigation, refund the cash bail, return seized property, and issue a formal public apology. They further allege that after the arrests, Awili was pressured by investigators to alter his statement and implicate the lawyers, a claim the EACC has not responded to on the record.

There is a wider commercial backdrop that Wachira’s lawyers have worked to foreground. The dispute underlying the meeting concerns more than Sh1.9 billion linked to Aero Handling EA Limited, a company associated with Tuju, and a claim that the National Treasury released funds to the Ministry of Defence that were never fully remitted to the company. That litigation is real and ongoing. But the argument that a genuine bribery investigation was manufactured to serve someone’s interests in that commercial row requires the EACC to have orchestrated a trap against an innocent advocate who had, by pure misfortune, ended up in a room with a disgraced former judge, a pile of unsolicited cash and a man who would later claim to have a child with the presiding judge. That is a great deal of bad luck for one afternoon.

The Law Society of Kenya has not issued a formal statement on Wachira’s case, and there is no indication of any disciplinary proceedings against him at this stage. Under Kenyan law, an advocate remains entitled to practice until a competent court finds otherwise. But the silence of the professional body over a case that has placed one of its members in an EACC holding cell alongside a man already removed from the bench for gross misconduct is itself a matter of public interest.

The DPP has not yet indicated whether charges will follow. The EACC has said its investigation remains ongoing. What is clear is that Kimani Wachira walked into Entim Sidai on March 9 as a legal consultant and walked out in handcuffs, his name attached permanently to a bribery scandal that reaches, if the allegations are to be believed, into the heart of a sitting judge’s chambers. His demand letter is forceful. The questions it cannot answer are more forceful still.