Misusing Courts? How A Chinese Firm’s Antics Risk Costing Kenya The Sh30 Billion Railway City Project

There is a scene playing out in Kenya’s courts right now that ought to chill every taxpayer, every infrastructure planner, and every diplomat in Nairobi who has laboured over the vision of a modern Railway City rising from the 13 acres of Kenya Railways land in the central business district.

A Chinese state-owned firm, China Civil Engineering Construction Corporation, known universally as by, has dragged the Kenyan government before two separate High Courts simultaneously, one in Nairobi and one in Kisumu, over a single procurement dispute.

The stated cause is righteous indignation at having its engineers deported.

The unstated consequence, whether intended or not, is that a transformative Sh30 billion project is now frozen in a web of litigation so dense that no contractor can be engaged, no ground can be broken, and no timetable can be assured.

Kenya’s courts, it must be said without equivocation, are not CCECC’s procurement appeals department. They never were.

The Railway City project is not a ministerial pet scheme. It is a centrepiece of Nairobi’s urban regeneration, a scheme designed to decongest the gridlocked city centre by creating a mixed-use hub of office blocks, retail malls, a light industrial zone, new railway lines, and connections to the planned Bus Rapid Transit network.

The UK government has pledged Sh11.9 billion towards it, representing 39 per cent of the total project cost. The UK’s Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office is separately procuring a technical assistance contract worth nine million pounds to run from mid-2026 to at least 2028.

The project has already been modelled as a Kenyan answer to the regeneration of London’s King’s Cross station. It is not hyperbole to say that the Railway City is perhaps the single most consequential urban infrastructure investment in Nairobi’s recent history. The fact that it is being held hostage by the internal commercial rivalry of two Chinese state enterprises is a scandal that demands a reckoning.

To understand what is actually happening here, it is necessary to understand who CCECC is, what it has done elsewhere, and what the pattern of its behaviour reveals about the firm that now asks Kenyan courts to protect it.

A Firm With A Problem Wherever It Goes

CCECC was incorporated in 1979 by the State Council of the People’s Republic of China, growing out of the foreign aid department of the Ministry of Railways.

Its foundational project was the Tanzania-Zambia Railway, the TAZARA line, a 1,860-kilometre Cold War-era infrastructure gift from Beijing to southern Africa. On the strength of that legacy, CCECC has expanded into over 50 countries across Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Americas, positioning itself as one of the world’s top 100 international contractors as ranked by the Engineering News Record.

What the glossy corporate profile does not mention is that CCECC’s global footprint is shadowed by a trail of procurement irregularities, regulatory sanctions, and outright misconduct findings that span at least three continents.

In August 2019, the World Bank debarred CCECC and five of its affiliated entities in Nigeria from eligibility for any World Bank-financed contract. The listed companies included CCECC Nigeria Railway Company Limited, CCECC Nigeria Lekki (FTA) Company Limited, and CCECC Nigeria Company Limited.

They were found to have violated the bank’s fraud and corruption policy, specifically provisions bordering on fraudulent practice, defined as any act or omission that knowingly or recklessly misleads a party to obtain a financial benefit or avoid an obligation in the procurement process.

The debarment was a direct consequence of cross-sanctioning triggered by the World Bank’s sanctions against CCECC’s parent, China Railway Construction Corporation Limited, and its affiliates worldwide. When confronted, CCECC Nigeria Limited initially denied it was among the blacklisted entities and issued a public statement claiming mistaken identity.

The World Bank confirmed to reporters that the sanction extended to all affiliates and subsidiaries under CRCC’s direct and indirect control, and that it would not speak further on the matter. CCECC’s denial, investigators noted, was false.

That same year, it emerged that CCECC had in 2018 allowed Nigerian government ministers and senior officials to hijack a scholarship programme the firm had offered for young Nigerians to study railway engineering abroad.

Rather than open the 40 slots to qualified applicants, the opportunities were distributed among the children and cronies of officials in the Federal Ministry of Transportation. No minister was punished.

The European Investment Bank went further.

In August 2023, the EIB and CCECC entered into a formal settlement agreement addressing what the bank described as past misconduct by CCECC as a tenderer in procurement procedures for EIB-financed projects.

The misconduct was not confined to one country or one incident. The EIB explicitly identified the affected projects as spanning Ecuador, Egypt, Malawi, Montenegro, Serbia, Tunisia, Ukraine, and Zambia, a sweep of eight countries across four continents. As part of the settlement, CCECC was required to enforce compliance standards, report on its material developments to the EIB for twelve months, and cooperate with ongoing EIB investigations into prohibited conduct, including misconduct committed by third parties.

In Malawi, procurement observers have documented an even more brazen pattern. Civil society auditors found that CCECC was awarded contracts to both relocate water pipelines and upgrade the same Kenyatta Road project in Lilongwe, effectively being paid twice for overlapping work.

The firm was the fourth-lowest bidder on the pipeline relocation component, yet it received the award. Governance and transparency experts publicly questioned the arrangement.

Roads Authority officials were accused by civil society organisations of being so captured by political interests that professional evaluation of Chinese firms’ technical qualifications was effectively suspended.

The Kenyatta Road project, launched with presidential fanfare in August 2021 and supposed to be complete in 18 months, had shown no progress by 2022.

This is the firm that now asks Kenyan courts to shield it from the consequences of what Kenyan immigration authorities say are legitimate administrative actions.

The Procurement Battle And Its Convenient Victims

The Kenya Railways Corporation launched the Railway City tender in late 2025. Three bidders emerged: CCECC at Sh22.9 billion, China Road and Bridge Corporation at Sh29.9 billion, and a consortium of China Overseas Engineering Group and China Railway Group at Sh32.5 billion.

Kenya Railways’ evaluation committee gave CRBC the highest technical score and, on that basis, declared it the best bidder despite it being the middle bidder on price.

CCECC and the China Overseas-China Railway consortium challenged the decision before the Public Procurement Administrative Review Board.

Their argument was specific and procedural: CRBC had submitted its technical and financial proposals on two separate flash disks placed inside the same envelope, a clear breach of procurement rules set by Kenya Railways itself.

The PPARB agreed.

On January 26, 2026, the board nullified the award to CRBC and directed Kenya Railways to re-evaluate the remaining compliant bids. The board’s language was categorical, finding that CRBC’s bid should not have progressed to financial evaluation and that the scoring of its financial proposals had been erroneous and misguided.

Any reasonable reading of that ruling would suggest that CCECC, as the lowest bidder among compliant submissions, stood to benefit substantially from the re-evaluation. But Kenya Railways, in a move that defies both logic and its own procurement history, again declared CRBC the best bidder on February 16, terming the flash disk confusion a minor error.

CCECC and the consortium promptly filed a second appeal. CRBC responded by running to the High Court in Nairobi to argue that the second PPARB appeal was an abuse of process and to challenge the board’s jurisdiction to hear it.

On March 11, the Nairobi High Court granted CRBC an interim order suspending the PPARB proceedings.

Two days later, on March 13, Kenyan security agencies moved with extraordinary speed and precision.

A project manager, Li Fangyi, was picked up from CCECC’s camp along the Kisian-Usenge road in Kisumu at 2pm by men who identified themselves as police officers.

They drove him to Nairobi. That same evening, a separate team stormed CCECC’s Riverside Drive compound in Lavington without identifying themselves and arrested Zhang Hongze, a CCECC engineer.

Both men were reunited at Jomo Kenyatta International Airport and bundled onto Kenya Airways flight KQ886 to Guangzhou, which departed at ten minutes past midnight. A third CCECC official, Director Li Wei, narrowly escaped the dragnet but had his passport seized.

The timing, two days after the court order silencing the PPARB, is not lost on anyone with a functioning memory. CCECC’s petition to the Kisumu High Court says so without equivocation, arguing that the arrests and deportations were orchestrated to intimidate the firm into abandoning its procurement challenge and clearing the way for CRBC to collect the Sh7 billion premium that separates the two bids.

The Sh7 Billion Question Kenya Must Answer

The arithmetic here is stark and should offend every Kenyan. CCECC bid Sh22.9 billion. CRBC bid Sh29.9 billion. If CRBC is awarded this contract, Kenya will pay Sh7 billion more for what the PPARB has already found should not have been awarded to CRBC in the first place.

The Railway City project is partly funded by UK taxpayers through FCDO. A Sh7 billion overcharge on a UK-backed, publicly scrutinised project is not a rounding error. It is a policy catastrophe.

There are questions that the courts, the public, and policymakers must now force into the open. Why did Kenya Railways, after being ordered by the PPARB to re-evaluate, simply re-run the same outcome? Was there political direction behind that decision? Who benefits from a Sh29.9 billion contract being awarded when a Sh22.9 billion compliant bid sat on the table? Why did Kenya’s security apparatus respond with the speed of a counter-terrorism operation to deport the employees of a company that had done nothing more than exercise its legal right to challenge a procurement decision before the appropriate administrative body? And why, of all the crowded procurement disputes in Kenya, did this one trigger a midnight deportation flight?

None of these questions are answered by CCECC’s litigation.

The Other Side Of The Coin: CCECC Is No Innocent

It would be a grave error, however, to conclude from the above that CCECC is simply an aggrieved bidder whose rights have been trampled. The firm’s conduct in this dispute also demands scrutiny, and the pattern it is establishing in Kenya is troubling.

CCECC has now triggered multiple parallel legal proceedings across two courts in two cities over a single procurement dispute. At the PPARB, it filed two appeals.

At the Nairobi High Court, proceedings initiated by CRBC have already blocked the PPARB. At the Kisumu High Court, CCECC has filed a constitutional petition seeking to restrain Interior Cabinet Secretary Kipchumba Murkomen, Immigration Director-General Evelyn Cheluget, Inspector-General Douglas Kanja, and Attorney-General Dorcas Oduor from taking any action against its employees.

This proliferation of simultaneous proceedings across multiple jurisdictions is precisely the kind of behaviour that legitimate procurement review systems are designed to prevent.

It is not impossible that the Kisumu petition is tactically timed, filed in a court far from Nairobi’s familiar procurement bar, to secure broader injunctive relief than CCECC could obtain in Nairobi.

The effect, whatever the intention, is jurisdictional confusion and institutional paralysis.

Courts in two cities are now issuing orders that touch on the same underlying dispute, and no one can be entirely certain which orders prevail.

There is also a deeper irony that should not escape the notice of any reader who has followed CCECC’s record. Here is a firm that the European Investment Bank has formally found engaged in procurement misconduct in eight countries, a firm whose Nigerian affiliates were debarred by the World Bank for fraud, a firm caught in Malawi receiving payments for overlapping contracts, now appearing before Kenyan courts wrapped in the constitutional language of due process, fair hearings, and freedom from arbitrary detention. The principle is sound. The messenger is compromised.

This does not mean its engineers deserved to be deported in the middle of the night.

If Kenyan authorities used immigration law as a weapon of commercial intimidation, that is a serious constitutional violation that must be remedied.

The Kisumu court was right to issue interim orders protecting CCECC’s employees from further harassment pending full hearing. Due process does not belong only to firms with clean hands.

But courts must also be alert to the risk of becoming instruments in a corporate war between two Chinese state enterprises that have both demonstrated, in different ways, a willingness to bend the rules in pursuit of African infrastructure contracts.

The question before the Kenyan judiciary is not simply whether CCECC’s employees were wrongly deported. It is also whether the entire architecture of litigation being constructed around this procurement dispute serves the public interest or subverts it.

What Policymakers Must Do

The Kenyan government has created this crisis for itself. Kenya Railways was told by the PPARB to re-evaluate the bids after CRBC’s procedural breach. Instead of doing so transparently, it arrived at the same conclusion a second time, triggering a second round of challenges that the state then attempted to short-circuit through midnight deportations.

This sequence, regulatory order, defiance, intimidation, litigation, is not the sequence of a government that respects its own procurement laws.

Parliament should demand an urgent statement from the Transport Cabinet Secretary on why Kenya Railways disregarded the PPARB’s first ruling.

The Public Procurement Regulatory Authority should conduct an independent review of the entire Railway City tender process.

The FCDO, as a major funder, has both the standing and the responsibility to make clear that UK taxpayer funds will not be committed to a project whose procurement integrity is under active judicial challenge in two courts simultaneously.

Above all, Kenya must recover control of this process from the courts and return it to where it belongs: a transparent re-evaluation of compliant bids, conducted in full public view, with documented justification for every scoring decision.

The Sh7 billion difference between the two leading bids is not a technicality.

It is a number large enough to build several secondary schools, equip several district hospitals, or resurface hundreds of kilometres of rural roads.

The Railway City is supposed to be Kenya’s King’s Cross. It would be a profound national embarrassment if the project that was to redefine Nairobi’s skyline were to become instead a monument to procurement capture and judicial abuse.

The courts can protect individual rights without allowing themselves to become battlegrounds for Chinese state-enterprise commercial rivalry. They must try to do both.

The author writes on governance and infrastructure policy. Views are the author’s own.