How Mary Wambui’s Bid To Delete Her Past Collided With A Fresh Sh400 Million Conflict-Of-Interest Finding

While Mary Wambui Mungai’s lawyers were in the Kiambu High Court arguing that the public has no further business knowing about her Sh2.2 billion tax evasion prosecution, Auditor-General Nancy Gathungu was finalising a report that hands the public something new to know.

In her audit for the year ending June 2025, Gathungu flagged conflict-of-interest concerns over contracts awarded to companies linked to a Communications Authority board chairperson and another board member under the Kenya Kwanza administration’s digital superhighway project.

One of those companies, Nightigale Enterprises Ltd, now trading as Nightigale (E.A) Limited, implemented Sh401.6 million worth of fibre optic works in the 2024/2025 financial year alone. The other flagged firm, linked to an unnamed board member, took Sh82.16 million.

The timing could not be worse for a woman whose entire legal argument before the Kiambu court rests on the claim that her past is irrelevant to her present.

A Project Built On Sh15 Billion And A Long List Of Names

The digital superhighway project is the centrepiece of the Kenya Kwanza administration’s digital economy agenda: 100,000 kilometres of fibre optic cable, 25,000 public Wi-Fi hotspots, 1,450 Digital Village Smart Hubs and three data centres, financed in two phases worth roughly Sh15 billion through the Universal Service Fund, a pool of money the Communications Authority itself manages. ICTA, the ICT Authority, was designated the procuring entity, while the CA retained budget approval and contractor payment functions, a division of labour that the Consumers Federation of Kenya (Cofek) has argued in court keeps the CA directly implicated regardless of who signs the tender documents.

Sixty-two firms bid for the backbone and metro tenders when they were opened on March 28, 2023. Seventy-five bid for public Wi-Fi. Nightigale Enterprises Ltd was one of them, and it won.

The Auditor-General’s Finding

Gathungu’s report does not deal in allegations from activists or opposition figures. It is the constitutional audit office’s own conclusion, based on a review of bidders’ company ownership documents, CR12 forms and the resumes of CA board members.

Her finding states that two companies in which the CA board chairperson and a board member held controlling interests were awarded contracts by ICT Authority under the digital superhighway project, and that the relevant board members were either managing directors or shareholders of those companies at the point the tenders were opened and evaluated, on February 28 and March 28, 2023 respectively. She further found that the board members in question resigned from their companies only after the contracts had already been awarded.

“Audit review of the bidders’ company ownership document, CR 12 and resume of board members, revealed that two companies in which the Board Chairperson and a Board member of CA had controlling interest in, were awarded contracts by ICT Authority.” — Auditor-General Nancy Gathungu

That is the audit office’s language, not a campaigner’s. It places the conflict not at the moment of appointment, and not at the moment of contract signing, but squarely at the moment that matters most in procurement law: when bids were opened and evaluated.

The Paper Trail Nightigale Would Rather You Not Trace

Nightigale Enterprises Ltd was incorporated in March 2012 with Peter Njoroge Muchoku and Grace Wanjiku Muchoku holding the company’s entire 800-share pool. Over the following decade, the company’s ownership changed hands with a frequency that has little obvious commercial logic but a great deal of political logic once the dates are laid against Mary Wambui’s own career.

In November 2014, Grace Muchoku exited and Evelyn Nyambura Mungai, Wambui’s daughter, entered as a director and shareholder, allotted 200 shares the following day. Business Registration Service records show a separate share movement dated October 20, 2014, even before Nyambura’s formal entry, in which the Muchokus transferred shares to her and to a Mr Ephantus Githui Gathieka. In 2018, Nyambura resigned and transferred her shares to Gathieka and back to Muchoku. In 2019, Muchoku resigned and forfeited 500 shares, which went to a Ruth Kinyanjui Waithira; Gathieka then resigned and his 500 shares went to a Samuel Kariuki Githui.

Mary Wambui herself first appears on Nightigale’s official ownership records on April 9, 2020, when Kariuki and Waithira transferred 300 shares each to her. The following month, May 20, 2020, she was appointed a director.

Then came the period that the Auditor-General’s report and Cofek’s court petition are really about.

In August 2022, ahead of that year’s general election, Evelyn Nyambura returned to Nightigale as a director after Kariuki transferred his remaining 200 shares to her. On December 2, 2022, President William Ruto appointed Mary Wambui chairperson of the CA board. Three days later, on December 5, 2022, Wambui resigned as a Nightigale director and, according to BRS records, transferred 500 shares to her daughter Evelyn, who now held 700 of the company’s 1,000 shares, a 70 percent stake.

A week after that share transfer, the CA signed a memorandum of understanding with ICTA committing Sh5 billion of Universal Service Fund money to the first phase of the digital superhighway. Two months later, in February 2023, ICTA advertised the backbone and metro tenders. They were opened on March 28, 2023, with Evelyn Nyambura still holding her 70 percent stake in Nightigale at the time, according to Cofek’s court filings.

On April 17, 2023, the CA and ICTA signed a technical cooperation agreement to operationalise the project. Eight days later, ICTA wrote to Nightigale informing it that it had won a Sh54.3 million tender for “Digital superhighway – Backbone & Metro.” Nightigale acknowledged the award on April 27. Two days after that, on April 29, 2023, Mary Wambui chaired the CA board meeting that ratified the ICTA memorandum of understanding, approved the technical cooperation agreement, and signed off on the Sh5 billion Universal Service Fund budget that would pay for the very contracts her daughter’s company had just been told it had won.

It was only on June 19, 2023, one week before Nightigale signed the contract, that Evelyn Nyambura resigned as director and transferred her 700 shares to Ruth Waithira.

In her resignation letter, dated that same day, Nyambura wrote that she had voluntarily resigned and transferred all her shares to “Ruth Waithira Kinyanjui, a director and shareholder of the company.” Nightigale signed the Backbone & Metro contract a week later, on June 26, 2023.

Cofek’s petition goes further than the timeline of resignations. It states that as late as May 29, 2024, after bids had been submitted but before final awards in some workstreams, Evelyn Nyambura still held a 70 percent stake in Nightigale, and that her removal coincided with Ruth Waithira’s holding jumping to 90 percent. Cofek has characterised this as a deliberate structuring of beneficial ownership designed to create the appearance of distance while keeping control within the family circle.

What The CA Says, And Why It Does Not Settle The Matter

To be fair to the institutions involved, the Communications Authority has not been silent.

In court filings responding to Cofek’s petition for Wambui’s removal, CA Director-General David Mugonyi maintained that neither Wambui nor the CA were engaged in the procurement process at any point and that the authority had no expectation of foreknowledge regarding Nightigale’s participation in a tender run by a different agency, ICTA. Solicitor-General Shadrack Mose offered a similar defence, noting that the tenders were processed through open national tendering and that execution happened directly between ICTA and the winning contractors.

Mugonyi has also disputed the characterisation of Wambui and her daughter as directors of Nightigale “as at April 2023,” telling the court that the Companies Registry informed him in writing that Evelyn Nyambura remained a director and shareholder only until June 2023, after which her shares were transferred. Nightigale’s own chief executive, Edward Njenga Muniu, wrote to ICTA in August 2024 confirming the same dates: Mary Mungai out on December 5, 2022, Evelyn Nyambura out on June 19, 2023.

These defences establish a fact that nobody disputes: the formal paperwork was tidied up before the contract was signed. What they do not establish is that the timing was coincidental. The Auditor-General, working from the same CR12 records and board member resumes that the CA itself submitted for audit, reached the opposite conclusion about what those dates mean for conflict of interest at the point of tender evaluation, which is the legally operative moment under procurement law, not the moment of contract execution. Mugonyi, asked for comment on the fresh AG finding, declined to discuss it, citing the sub judice rule given that Cofek’s petition remains before the High Court.

A Pattern That Predates The Fibre Optic Story

For anyone conducting due diligence on Mary Wambui, and her own court papers say plenty of people are doing exactly that, the Nightigale finding does not arrive in isolation. It lands on top of an already crowded file.

In December 2021, Wambui and her daughter Purity Njoki Mungai, both directors of Purma Holdings Limited, were charged at the Anti-Corruption Court with eight counts of tax evasion totalling Sh2,231,789,125, arising from government supply contracts for boots, uniforms, cereals and medical items sold to the military, KEMSA and other state agencies. When KRA first summoned her in June 2021, she did not appear. When investigators moved to arrest her in December 2021, she was tracked to Weston Hotel, a property publicly associated with then-Deputy President Ruto, and left before she could be apprehended, leaving behind an identity card, bank cards, a firearms licence and a travel permit. A separate charge of illegal possession of a pistol and ammunition followed in January 2022.

Both cases ended the same way. The firearms charge was dropped in December 2022. The tax case was withdrawn on January 10, 2023, after what court papers describe as a compounding of offences and payment of fines, the details of which, including the final amount paid, have never been made public. The sequence of dates is not in dispute: Ruto appointed Wambui CA chairperson on December 2, 2022; the firearms case was dropped that same month; the Sh2.2 billion tax case was withdrawn five weeks after the appointment.

Months later, in 2023, then-Trade Cabinet Secretary Moses Kuria disclosed in Senate testimony that Purma Holdings had been awarded Kenya National Trading Corporation contracts for 30,000 metric tonnes of rice, 12,500 tonnes of edible oil and 20,000 tonnes of beans. KNTC Managing Director Lucy Anangwe later testified that Purma was paid Sh3.9 billion for rice with an actual market value of Sh3.1 billion, an Sh800 million markup.

Combined with the edible oil and beans contracts, Purma’s KNTC exposure alone reached roughly Sh9.8 billion. Three other entities with documented links to Wambui’s network, Charma Holdings, Enterprise Supplies Ltd and Evertec General Trading Company, picked up additional KNTC contracts worth hundreds of millions. The EACC opened an investigation. Former KNTC boss Pamela Mutua was charged. None of Wambui’s companies were.

In 2024, the Directorate of Criminal Investigations froze bank accounts linked to her companies over the KNTC contracts, a freeze that, by Wambui’s own account in later court filings, contributed to her difficulty servicing an Sh8.267 billion loan from Equity Bank secured against Glee Hotel, her 211-room property on the Northern Bypass.

The Glee Hotel Debt: From Sh8.2 Billion To A Sh100 Million Lifeline

The Glee Hotel.

The Glee Hotel saga has, in the months since, become a parallel public spectacle. In January 2026, Equity Bank moved to auction the hotel after Wambui and Glee Hotel Ltd defaulted on loans totalling Sh8.267 billion. Court filings show Wambui offered Sh5 billion in full settlement, which the bank rejected, then raised the offer to Sh7 billion, which the bank also rejected. A November 2025 letter from her camp, not marked “without prejudice,” according to Equity Bank’s filings, has been treated by the bank as an admission of the debt.

The dispute has run through multiple court rounds since.

By February 2026, the parties had recorded a consent under which Equity Bank agreed to accept Sh7.75 billion in full and final settlement, roughly 85 percent of the total owed, financed through a refinancing arrangement with KCB Bank, payable within 45 days.

When that window lapsed, Wambui returned to court seeking another 60 days. As of this week, a High Court judge has given her a narrower lifeline: a Sh100 million deposit within seven days, failing which the suspension of Equity Bank’s right to auction the property, including the Glee Hotel land in Runda and other parcels in Westlands, South B, Ruiru, Thindigua, Ruaka and Ongata Rongai on which her daughters are listed as guarantors, lapses automatically. It is not yet clear whether the payment was made.

The Google Petition, Read Against This Week’s News

It is against this backdrop that Wambui’s Kiambu High Court petition against Google has to be read.

Filed seeking suppression of 35 links to coverage of the 2021-2023 tax case, the petition invokes the European “right to be forgotten” doctrine established in the 2014 Google Spain case, section 25 of Kenya’s Data Protection Act, and constitutional protections for dignity, privacy and reputation under Articles 28, 31 and 33.

“International stakeholders who carry out online due diligence encounter the outdated articles and are misled into doubting my integrity and suitability for engagement.” — Mary Wambui Mungai, in court filings

It is, on its face, an argument that the information is true but inconvenient, made in the same week that Kenya’s constitutional audit authority published a finding that adds a new and currently un-litigated allegation to exactly the kind of due diligence file she is asking Google to bury.

Kenya does not have a codified right to be forgotten. The Data Protection Act’s erasure provisions were designed around personal data held by data controllers, not around search engine indexing of public court records and published journalism.

Google Kenya Ltd, for its part, has argued in its filings that it is a separate legal entity providing only sales, marketing and research functions in Kenya, and that it neither owns nor operates the search engine the petition is actually aimed at, Google LLC, which has not filed a replying affidavit. Four of the 35 links Wambui wants suppressed lead to content published by the Kenya Revenue Authority itself.

What The Record Now Shows

Strip away the legal argument over jurisdiction and statutory interpretation, and what is left is a timeline that any competent investor, lender or development partner doing due diligence on Mary Wambui would want laid out in full: a Sh2.2 billion tax prosecution that evaporated through an undisclosed financial settlement five weeks after a presidential appointment; KNTC contracts worth roughly Sh9.8 billion that followed within months, including a court-established Sh800 million rice markup; an Sh8.267 billion bank default now being managed through successive court-ordered partial payments; and, as of this week, an Auditor-General’s finding that a company whose ownership cycled through her daughter and a tight circle of associates, timed precisely around her CA appointment and the tender calendar, took home Sh401.6 million in conflicted digital superhighway contracts in a single financial year.

Cofek’s petition over the Nightigale awards remains before the High Court.

The Auditor-General’s report is now part of the public record for Parliament’s Public Accounts Committee to take up. And the Kiambu court’s ruling on whether 35 links documenting how Wambui’s earlier brush with prosecution ended will remain searchable is, as of this week, still pending.

What is not pending is the question of whether the story is over. The Auditor-General’s report answers that for her.