INSIDE THE SH1.5 BILLION HEIST: How a Dead UN Anti-Poverty Programme Became a Treasury Cartel’s Personal Bank, and Why Nobody Noticed for Three Years

Three years after the government officially switched off the lights on a rural anti-poverty programme funded by a specialised agency of the United Nations, the money kept flowing. Not to the pastoralists in Turkana who had been promised drought insurance.

Not to the women’s cooperatives in Kitui waiting on micro-credit.

It flowed instead into a Co-operative Bank account that should have been dead, into a KCB account opened with forged paperwork nearly three years after the programme’s official burial, and finally into concrete: a four-storey hotel rising over Eldoret, apartment blocks in Athi River, and title deeds scattered across three counties.

According to court filings lodged by the Ethics and Anti-Corruption Commission in the High Court, the true final cost of the Programme for Rural Outreach of Financial Innovations and Technologies, known to Treasury insiders simply as PROFIT, was not the roughly Sh4 billion IFAD and the Kenyan government sank into it between 2010 and 2019. It was closer to Sh5.5 billion, once you add the Sh1,554,455,284.35 that EACC investigators say a network of Treasury accountants and their relatives allegedly extracted from an account the programme was never supposed to use again.

The programme died in December 2019. The looting, investigators allege, was only getting started.

A PROGRAMME BUILT FOR THE FORGOTTEN

PROFIT was never glamorous. Launched on 22 December 2010 under the National Treasury’s Directorate of Budget, Fiscal and Economic Affairs, its brief was unsexy but urgent: extend credit guarantees, insurance products and value-chain financing to small-scale farmers, pastoralists, artisanal fishers, landless labourers and rural women locked out of formal banking across Kenya’s arid and semi-arid counties.

Total funding stood at 30.89 million US dollars, of which IFAD, the UN’s specialised agency for rural poverty and hunger, put up the overwhelming share at 30.33 million dollars, with the Kenyan government contributing 561,000 dollars.

Over its near-decade life, the programme reached more than 120,000 of the country’s poorest citizens. It closed on 31 December 2019, its books meant to be settled and its accounts meant to be shuttered.

They were not. And that single administrative failure, EACC now alleges, is what a cartel of Treasury insiders spent the next three years exploiting.

THE MECHANICS OF A GHOST PROGRAMME

What makes the PROFIT case unusual, even by the standards of Kenya’s crowded corruption docket, is not simply that money went missing. It is that the money was drawn from a programme that, on paper, no longer existed.

Investigators say the National Treasury kept the old PROFIT operations account alive at Co-operative Bank long after the closure date, and that on 8 December 2016, three years before the shutdown, then Principal Secretary Kamau Thugge, who now sits as Governor of the Central Bank of Kenya, added three names as additional signatories: Billy Otieno Obango, the programme’s accountant, Gladys Julliet Chepkarat and John Maina Muriithi. EACC’s court papers do not accuse Dr Thugge of any role in the fraud that followed, and the addition of signatories in 2016 was, on its face, a routine act taken while the programme was still a live concern.

But it placed the exact names who would later be accused of the theft directly onto the account years before the alleged looting began, a detail that raises uncomfortable questions about how closely Treasury’s own leadership tracked a donor-funded account under its watch.

The scheme, as EACC describes it, depended on paperwork built to look legitimate and processed by people positioned to wave it through. Genuine PROFIT vouchers required a two-stage sign-off: certification by an Authority to Incur Expenditure holder and separate authorisation by an accounting officer.

The fraudulent vouchers investigators uncovered needed only one signature. Between the end of 2019 and mid-2022, EACC alleges, a further Sh1.379 billion was released from the National Treasury into the supposedly dormant Co-operative Bank account under the guise of ongoing programme funding, funding requests that invoked IFAD’s name even though the donor had ceased financing PROFIT the moment it closed.

Of that sum, Sh799.8 million is alleged to have been withdrawn in cash by Obango alone, and Sh579.3 million allegedly transferred onward to a web of entities and individuals.

When investigators say that channel began to slow, the alleged conspirators adapted. In October 2022, nearly three years after PROFIT’s official closure, Obango and Chepkarat are accused of opening an entirely new account, this time at KCB Bank Kenya, in the programme’s name, using what EACC describes as false and forged documents.

Treasury proceeded to release a further Sh175.3 million into it.

Investigators allege Sh157.8 million of that was paid out through cheques backed by more forged paperwork, that Obango personally withdrew Sh897,600 in one cash transaction, and that Chepkarat withdrew Sh16.1 million. As the net closed in 2023, EACC says Sh206 million in residual funds was shifted in March and May to an account belonging to the Rural Kenya Financial Inclusion Facility at Housing Finance Bank, a final attempt to move the money one step further from view before the freeze orders landed.

WHERE THE MONEY ALLEGEDLY WENT

If the paperwork behind PROFIT was designed to be forgettable, the assets EACC is now moving to seize are not. Investigators allege that Obango used proceeds of the fraud to buy a residential flat in Stoni Athi Phase I, Mavoko, from the National Housing Corporation for Sh8.85 million, and to acquire four housing units in Kamulu’s Avana Garden Estate for roughly Sh18.1 million.

Chepkarat and Philip Sigo Chepkarat are accused of channelling part of the haul into the construction of the four-storey Skyline Hotel in Eldoret, a commercial property built, EACC alleges, with money that was supposed to insure a pastoralist’s herd against drought.

A company called 020 Investments Limited, which EACC’s filings describe as a proxy firm whose directors are Chepkarat’s own children, allegedly received Sh81.4 million to Sh104.8 million across the scheme’s various transaction batches and used the proceeds to purchase three houses in Eldoret’s Racecourse area.

Jarods Agency Limited allegedly received a further Sh40.1 million after the programme’s closure. Investigators have also flagged land parcels at Pioneer or Racecourse Block 2/493 and 2/494 in Kapmalel, along with additional units across the Avana I and II Gardens developments in Kamulu, as forfeiture targets.

Assets Named in the EACC Forfeiture Application

Named alongside Obango and Chepkarat in the court filings are a lineup of Treasury accounting officials that reads like an internal organisation chart: John Maina Muriithi, Nemwel Moturi Mutonya, Lilian Wanjiku Dishon, who served as Senior Deputy Accountant General, George Kihara, Head of the Accounting Unit, Susan Warukira, Principal Accountant, John Ngure Kabutha, Sylvia Awino Obango and others. EACC accuses several of them not of pocketing the money directly, but of abusing their positions or failing to stop the bleeding while it happened under their supervision. None of the accused has yet filed a substantive response to the allegations, and the case remains before the High Court.

A UN AGENCY WAKES UP, THREE YEARS LATE

For nearly the entire life of the alleged fraud, IFAD had no idea.

The theft, on EACC’s own timeline, began after the programme’s oversight had already ended in December 2019, meaning the agency’s monitoring architecture, built to track a live project, had nothing left to watch. It was only after Business Daily first published details from the court filings on 18 June 2026 that IFAD acknowledged the scandal publicly, telling reporters it could not comment on ongoing legal proceedings but that it takes all allegations of fraud seriously and had referred the matter to its Office of Audit and Oversight and its Independent Office of Evaluation, in line with what it describes as a zero-tolerance approach to fraud and corruption.

The agency’s position, that its oversight had already lapsed when the alleged theft occurred, is technically accurate and diplomatically convenient.

It also raises a harder question that IFAD has yet to answer publicly: why a programme account tied to its name was allowed to remain open, active and capable of receiving fresh Treasury disbursements for three years after the donor’s involvement had formally ended, with apparently no reconciliation, audit trail or closure notice from either side catching it.

IFAD remains deeply invested in Kenya regardless. The agency has committed more than Sh75 billion across 21 projects in the country, including a Sh11.7 billion facility signed in January 2026 for fertiliser imports and a Sh16.4 billion loan inked in June 2025 for a natural resources management programme. The PROFIT scandal now sits as an uncomfortable asterisk beside that portfolio.

THE FAMILIAR SHAPE OF KENYAN GRAFT

Strip away the acronyms and the PROFIT case follows a pattern investigators and civil society groups have documented across Kenya’s public finance system for years: a donor-funded programme with real beneficiaries, a closure date that exists on paper but not in the banking system, and insiders positioned close enough to the account to know exactly how long the seams would stay unstitched.

What sets this file apart is the brazenness of the timeline. This was not a scheme that skimmed money while the programme was still operating and harder to audit.

Investigators allege the most aggressive extraction, the KCB account opened with forged documents, the Sh175.3 million disbursed into it, happened nearly three years after PROFIT had already been declared closed, at a point when any competent reconciliation should have flagged the account as dormant.

The High Court has moved to freeze the implicated accounts and bar the accused and their associates from transferring, withdrawing or otherwise dealing with the flagged assets pending determination of EACC’s recovery suit.

That suit, seeking the full Sh1,554,455,284.35 the commission characterises as proceeds of corruption, is now working its way through a court calendar already crowded with billion-shilling recovery cases spanning parastatals, county governments and Treasury itself.

WHAT COMES NEXT

For the moment, the properties sit under seizure orders, IFAD’s internal auditors are combing through a paper trail that outlasted the programme it documents, and the accused have not yet told the court their side of the story.

What is already on the record, in EACC’s own filings, is a Sh1.5 billion answer to a question rural Kenya has been asking for years: what happens to donor money after the cameras and the closing ceremony leave. In this telling, at least part of the answer is a hotel in Eldoret and a row of apartments in Athi River, built on an account that was never supposed to be touched again.

Kenya Insights will continue to track the PROFIT recovery suit and IFAD’s internal audit as both proceed through their respective processes.