LSK On The Spot For Renewing Rogue Lawyer Dennis Onyango’s Licence Despite Mounting Evidence He Held Foreign Investors’ Millions Hostage

Dennis Ochieng Onyango is not a household name in Kenyan legal circles, and that, sources close to multiple ongoing cases suggest, is precisely how he prefers it. The advocate, who operates under the nameplate of Dennis Onyango and Associates from the seventh floor of Wu Yi Plaza on Galana Road in Nairobi, has cultivated a reputation for keeping a low profile even as a cascade of complaints from foreign investors, documented court filings, formal letters to the Law Society of Kenya, and proceedings before the Advocates Complaints Commission paint a picture that is anything but quiet.

At the centre of the storm is a question that grows more urgent with every month that passes without an answer: why, in the face of mounting and documented evidence of client funds potentially misappropriated, did the Law Society of Kenya renew Dennis Onyango’s practising certificate for the year 2026?

Why did LSK renew Onyango’s practising certificate for 2026 in the face of mounting documented evidence of missing client funds?

That question is not posed lightly. It is the question that Julian Garrison, a British national acting on behalf of TL Cabin OU, an Estonian company, put directly to the Law Society in a letter dated 28 January 2026 after discovering that Onyango’s name had reappeared on the LSK’s own ‘Search Advocate’ portal with a valid practice number for the year 2026. Garrison had previously written to the Law Society on multiple occasions raising concerns about the advocate, and had received no response to any of his correspondence. Not a single acknowledgement. Not a line.

The funds at the centre of TL Cabin’s dispute with Onyango are not trivial. According to the letter to the LSK, the total quantum of money deposited with Onyango across multiple clients exceeds USD 500,000. The sum specifically involving TL Cabin stands at USD 101,750, deposited into Onyango’s care under the terms of a formal escrow agreement in June 2023. Nearly three years have elapsed. The money has not been returned. And the Law Society, by renewing Onyango’s practising certificate, has effectively told the world that there is nothing to see here.

The Escrow That Swallowed Itself

The facts of the TL Cabin matter, as laid out in a signed letter dated 3 February 2026 from Lembit Niit, a representative of TL Cabin OU, to Dennis Onyango directly, are damning in their specificity. TL Cabin’s money, the letter confirms, was transferred into a Consolidated Bank account held by Onyango’s firm on or around 20 and 27 June 2023. The purpose of the funds was explicitly set out in clause 2.7 of the escrow agreement, which provided that the money was being held ‘for the purposes of payment to the Seller for ascertained and agreed cost relating to export related costs.’ The transaction in question concerned a gold purchase arrangement involving a company called Blu Afrique Limited.

Critically, the escrow agreement itself contained language that should have foreclosed any dispute about the ultimate ownership of the funds. Clause 2.8 of the agreement confirmed that TL Cabin was the only ‘client’ for the purposes of the Advocates (Accounts) Rules 1966 and that Blu Afrique Limited was a signatory solely for the purpose of receiving notifications and issuing a jointly signed release notice. Even more conclusively, the sale and purchase agreement between buyer and seller, dated 29 November 2023, the same agreement that the presiding magistrate relied upon in court proceedings, contained an explicit acknowledgement by Blu Afrique Limited that the escrow funds could be returned to TL Cabin without protest or objection, at the earlier of the completion of the gold sale or 12 December 2023.

By 12 December 2023, the gold transaction had not completed. The contractual trigger for return of the funds had therefore been met. And yet Dennis Onyango did not return the money.

The seller had by contract agreed the funds were to be returned as far back as 12 December 2023. Onyango still has not returned them.

What Onyango has provided instead, according to the February letter, is a single set of bank statements covering October 2024 to March 2025, sent informally by WhatsApp, uncertified, and relating to an account at Stanbic Bank. The problem, as the letter pointedly observes, is that TL Cabin’s money was never deposited into a Stanbic Bank account. It went into a Consolidated Bank account. The bank statements Onyango has furnished relate to an entirely different institution, an entirely different account, and cover a period that begins more than a year after the funds were deposited. They are, in the language of the letter, ‘wrong bank, wrong bank account and wrong periods.’

When pressed on why he will not provide what any rendering of a client account legally requires, being, as Judge A.C. Bett set out in Wambugu v The Disciplinary Tribunal of the Law Society of Kenya and Ngugi [2024] KEHC 11034 (KLR), an extract from the firm’s cash book and redacted bank statements reflecting every debit and credit in respect of funds received and held on behalf of a client, Onyango’s responses have veered into the territory of the remarkable. According to Garrison, Onyango at one point suggested that TL Cabin had used the escrow funds to purchase an apartment. Onyango even presented a document that appeared to record such a transaction, a document on which Onyango himself appeared as the client’s advocate. When challenged on this, he was unable to substantiate the claim. The apartment purchase did not take place. It appears to have been an invention, one Onyango could not maintain under scrutiny.

A Norwegian Investor. Then a British One. Then Court.

TL Cabin is not alone. The Norway-based businessman John Birger Silheim filed proceedings in the Milimani Commercial and Tax Division in July 2025 against Dennis Onyango, claiming that he deposited USD 403,097 into Onyango’s Stanbic Bank account at the Chiromo branch in four tranches between August and December 2023, that the proposed transaction for which the funds were intended never materialised, and that Onyango has since refused to return the money. Silheim’s legal team alleged the production of a forged letter purportedly from Stanbic Bank, a document the bank has since denied issuing.

Capital FM reported at the time that Silheim’s application sought urgent orders to freeze Onyango’s Stanbic account and to direct the DCI’s Banking Fraud Unit to investigate and report on the matter. The Milimani court was told that Silheim had made four separate deposits of USD 87,097, USD 86,000, USD 130,000 and USD 100,000, all from his personal Norwegian bank account, all for gold procurement purposes. The money has not been returned.

John Birger Solheim is also the plaintiff in High Court Commercial Case No. HCCCOMM E756 of 2024, in which Dennis Onyango and Associates is listed as the defendant, with Xico Trading Limited as the first interested party, Blu Afrique Limited as the second interested party, and Jean Andre Ilunga, Joseph Marie Ntumba and Alphonsine Ngalula, described as officials of Groupe de Societe Miniera Shabunda, as the third interested parties. Court documents confirm that this matter is active in the Milimani High Court.

Onyango’s own defence became so incoherent that those watching the proceedings were uncertain, by the end, what excuse was even being offered.

It is in the context of this case that a further dimension of the Onyango story emerges, one that implicates a more familiar name in Nairobi’s legal fraud landscape. According to Garrison, approximately one year ago, Onyango aligned himself with advocate Collins Alphonce Odoyo Osewe, apparently after Garrison had reported the previous advocate handling the matter to the Advocates Complaints Commission and that advocate lost the appetite for further involvement. Osewe, sources say, has a considerably stronger constitution for contested litigation involving gold transactions.

Collins Osewe: The Serial Defendant Who Keeps Reappearing

Collins Alphonce Odoyo Osewe is no stranger to Kenya’s legal system, except that in most of his appearances he sits not at the bar but in the dock. In October 2025, a Nairobi magistrate ordered Osewe to appear for plea in a criminal case in which he is charged alongside accomplice Patroba Odhiambo Tobias with obtaining Ksh 35.7 million from businessman Bernard Shiaundu Aete by false pretences, through the fraudulent promise of 400 kilograms of gold. In a separate count, Osewe faces additional charges of swindling Adeyeye Enitan Ogunwusi of Ksh 26.1 million using the same device. All of these offences are alleged to have occurred in May 2023.

Osewe’s response to the October 2025 plea hearing was characteristic. His legal team told the magistrate that he was admitted to Kenyatta National Hospital and had booked an emergency medical procedure in India. The court deferred the matter. Earlier civil proceedings reveal that in 2023, multiple plaintiffs, including Ogunwusi, Aete and associated entities, sought and obtained orders freezing accounts held by Osewe Alphonce Collins Odoyo, Odero Osiemo and Co. Advocates, and Collins Grace and Associates Advocates, at Ecobank, across three separate bank account numbers, in connection with what they alleged was a USD 610,000 fake gold scheme.

Garrison’s information to this publication establishes a further link: that Osewe, operating under the name Collins Grace and Associates Advocates, from what is described as House No. 182, UN Drive, has entered an appearance in the HCCCOMM E756 proceedings, purportedly representing the third interested parties. This is where the matter tips from the merely extraordinary into the structurally scandalous.

According to an affidavit of service sworn by Dennis Onyango himself on 26 February 2026, Onyango personally attended the offices of Collins Grace and Associates at House No. 182, UN Drive on 24 February 2026, and served Osewe’s firm with the application under certificate of urgency and the court order. Osewe subsequently acknowledged service and filed a notice of appointment.

But there is a problem. At the time that Osewe took service and appointed himself as advocate for the third interested parties, Collins Alphonce Odoyo Osewe was listed as ‘inactive’ on the Law Society of Kenya’s own ‘Search Advocate’ portal. An inactive listing on LSK’s portal means, at minimum, that the advocate does not hold a valid practising certificate. An advocate without a valid practising certificate cannot lawfully accept a brief, appear for a client, or conduct legal proceedings. And yet there he was, taking service and appointing himself in an active High Court matter.

There is also the question of the address. When Garrison’s own team previously attempted to serve Osewe at the UN Drive address while he was listed as active for 2025, a process server reported that the physical address did not exist. Garrison now raises the same concern about the service documented in Onyango’s affidavit. If the address is fictitious, or if Osewe was not lawfully entitled to practise at the time of service, then the entire procedural edifice that Onyango has constructed around the third party notices begins to look less like legitimate litigation and more like a mechanism for delay.

Osewe was listed as ‘inactive’ on LSK’s portal when he took service in the HCCCOMM E756 proceedings. An advocate without a valid certificate cannot lawfully conduct litigation. And yet there he was.

Jonathan Opande and the Blu Afrique Connection

The Blu Afrique thread that runs through the TL Cabin escrow dispute is not without its own colourful history. Jonathan Okoth Opande, a former aspirant for the Nyakach parliamentary seat, was publicly identified by the Directorate of Criminal Investigations in October 2023 as one of Nairobi’s most notorious fake gold scammers. Arrested at Jomo Kenyatta International Airport as he attempted to board a Kisumu-bound Kenya Airways flight to evade law enforcement, Opande had already survived multiple police dragnets across the preceding months.

The DCI confirmed at the time of his arrest that Opande, operating as the alleged chief executive of Blu Afrique Limited, had obtained money from two Thai nationals, Kitvisit Songsri and Nutsaphol Songsri, with the promise of supplying gold. A raid on his Lavington office, converted into a lavish operational base, yielded fake gold bars, pellets, a makeshift smelting machine, KRA export seals, Ministry of Mining branded dust coats, company seals, and documentation whose authenticity remained to be established. Opande denied the allegations and was released on bond of Ksh 500,000 pending hearing.

The DCI has since described Opande as a serial actor in the Nairobi gold scam ecosystem with connections to multiple separate fraudulent transactions involving different nationalities, including South Africans, Chinese nationals and Thais, across the period 2019 to 2023. That an entity bearing the name Blu Afrique Limited now appears as an interested party in proceedings in which Dennis Onyango is the defendant, and that Onyango continues to invoke that entity’s alleged interests as a basis for withholding TL Cabin’s escrow funds, is a detail that sources close to the matter regard as more than coincidental.

Lawyers as the Infrastructure of the Scam

Kenya’s fake gold industry has, over the past decade, perfected the art of borrowed legitimacy. The most effective weapon in the arsenal of a Nairobi gold fraudster is not a smelting machine or a forged Ministry of Mining letter, formidable as those tools are. It is the escrow account of a practising advocate, preferably one registered with the Law Society of Kenya, bearing the stamp and signature of a High Court officer. When a foreign investor is told that their funds will be held securely in the client account of an advocate licensed by the Law Society of Kenya, they believe it. They are supposed to believe it. The law says they should be able to believe it.

The pattern is now well documented across multiple cases. In July 2025, DCI detectives arrested advocate Michael Otieno Owano, proprietor of Otieno M.O. Law Advocates, in connection with a scheme in which a Canadian investor lost USD 618,000, with USD 318,400 wired directly into Owano’s law firm account following a fraudulent proforma invoice from a company called EAI Logistics. The victim was then directed to wire an additional USDT 300,000 to a cryptocurrency wallet. No gold was ever delivered. The DCI Director described the case as a disturbing abuse of legal privilege.

In February 2026, Willis Onyango Wasonga was arraigned in connection with a separate scheme in which an American investor’s funds were deposited into what was presented as an escrow account operated by advocate Michael Otieno Owano of MOAC Advocates. Fictitious legal representation agreements were generated to create the illusion that the law firm was handling bona fide commercial transactions. The funds, the DCI found, were rapidly moved through multiple company accounts before being wired overseas.

The use of advocate client accounts as conduit points is not incidental to these schemes. It is structural. Without the lawyer’s stamp, the foreign investor does not wire the money. The stamp is the product. The escrow arrangement is the mechanism. And the Law Society of Kenya is, in a meaningful sense, the guarantor of that mechanism’s credibility.

Without the lawyer’s stamp, the foreign investor does not wire the money. The stamp is the product. The LSK is the guarantor of its credibility.

The LSK’s Deafening Silence

Garrison’s January 2026 letter to the Law Society posed the question in terms that admit no ambiguity. He outlined two scenarios. Either Onyango has maintained client funds properly, in which case his refusal to render an account is itself professional misconduct under paragraph 83 of the Code of Standards of Professional Practice and Ethical Conduct, which was brought to the Society’s attention before the certificate was renewed. Or he has not maintained the funds properly but has nevertheless contrived to submit an Accountant’s Certificate to obtain his practising licence, in which case the certificate was obtained fraudulently.

Both scenarios, Garrison argued, should have operated as a red flag. The Law Society had been informed. The Advocates Complaints Commission, according to Garrison’s letter, had itself informed him that a disciplinary prosecution against Onyango was soon to follow. And yet the practising certificate was renewed.

The LSK Act is explicit about the Society’s obligations. Section 4(c) requires the Society to ensure that all persons who practise law in Kenya meet the standards of professional conduct appropriate for the services they provide. Section 6(c) enshrines the protection of the public interest as a guiding principle. Garrison’s letter asked, not unreasonably, whether the Law Society’s position is that it has no interest in protecting the public, or that it does not care to safeguard members of the public from its members, particularly if those members of the public are foreign nationals.

The LSK has not responded to any of Garrison’s letters. It has not responded to queries submitted in connection with this investigation. Under Section 10 of the Advocates Act, no person shall practise as an advocate without a valid practising certificate. The certificate is not merely an administrative formality. It is the Society’s endorsement. Each time it is renewed for an advocate against whom credible, documented, repeatedly communicated concerns have been raised, it is the Society that bears moral responsibility for whatever that advocate does next.

The New Website and the Sole Practitioner

While his clients have been writing letters to regulators and filing court papers, Dennis Onyango has apparently found time to build an impressive new website for his firm. Garrison’s January 2026 letter to the LSK quoted the firm’s ‘Our Story’ section, which describes a firm established in 2010 with a vision to provide exceptional legal services, grown into one of Kenya’s respected law firms, operating through two specialized departments of Litigation and Commercial and Conveyancing, recognised as leaders in regulatory compliance, AML and CFT advisory, precious metals trade law, and cross-border legal matters.

The claims are, on their face, extraordinary. Particularly the claim to leadership in AML and CFT advisory, anti-money laundering and counter-terrorism financing, from a firm whose principal now faces multiple court proceedings alleging the misappropriation of escrow funds held for foreign nationals in cross-border transactions.

Garrison’s letter noted that Onyango is a sole practitioner. The individuals presented on the website as colleagues or partners apparently cannot be located on the LSK’s own Search Advocate portal. An earlier version of the firm’s website, Garrison alleges, was taken down after he began making enquiries about its accuracy, having been created for the purpose of winning a specific tender by deception. The LSK’s own portal listed Onyango’s practice categories for 2025 as including escrow agent work, comprising five percent of his practice, a categorisation that becomes darkly ironic in the context of what three separate groups of foreign investors allege has become of their escrow funds.

The Third Party Ruse

Dennis Onyango’s latest tactical manoeuvre in the HCCCOMM E756 proceedings, according to Garrison, has been to issue Third Party Notices to three other parties in the litigation. A Third Party Notice is a legal device by which a defendant seeks contribution or indemnity from third parties in respect of any liability the defendant may face. In circumstances where the defendant has a straightforward case to answer, the device is legitimate. In the present case, sources familiar with the matter argue that it functions as little more than a mechanism to multiply proceedings, expand the cast of participants, and delay a resolution that the underlying escrow agreement and the contractual language already make virtually inevitable.

The procedural choreography of the third party notices also raises a question about Osewe’s involvement. If Osewe is indeed not currently a practising advocate, his purported acceptance of service and filing of a notice of appointment would be legally ineffective and potentially constitute the holding out of oneself as an advocate in contravention of the Advocates Act. It is a question that the Law Society, the Advocates Complaints Commission and the presiding court may all need to consider.

A Pattern, Not an Anomaly

What emerges from this investigation is not the story of one rogue lawyer operating in isolation. It is the story of a system that has allowed a particular model of fraud, using the architecture of the legal profession, to operate with insufficient consequence for those who benefit from it and insufficient protection for those who suffer from it.

The Advocates (Accounts) Rules 1966 are unambiguous. Rule 13 requires advocates to maintain records of client funds and to account to clients on demand. The Advocates Complaints Commission exists to prosecute professional misconduct. The Law Society’s Disciplinary Tribunal has powers to suspend, strike off, and order compensation. These are not tools without teeth. They are tools that, in the cases documented here, appear to have been applied too slowly, too opaquely, and too reluctantly.

At the time of publication, the Advocates Complaints Commission had not responded to queries about the status of proceedings against Onyango. The Law Society of Kenya had not responded to questions about the basis on which Onyango’s 2026 practising certificate was issued, whether the complaints submitted by Garrison and others were considered before the certificate was renewed, and whether it has any mechanism for suspending a practising certificate pending the outcome of disciplinary proceedings. Onyango himself was provided with an opportunity to respond to the allegations contained in this investigation. No response was received.

Lembit Niit, writing for TL Cabin OU, set a deadline of 5 February 2026 for Onyango either to return the funds, pay them into court, or render an account. That deadline passed. The funds remain outstanding. The practising certificate remains valid. And the Law Society of Kenya has still not answered a single letter.

The deadline passed. The funds remain outstanding. The practising certificate remains valid. And the LSK has still not answered a single letter.