For six years, the fight over who truly owns SportPesa has run on two tracks at once. In the courtrooms of Nairobi and London, judges have pored over deeds of assignment, board minutes and share registers.

Online and across Kenya’s newsrooms, a parallel trial has played out in headlines, statements and rebuttals, with Paul Wanderi Ndung’u cast alternately as a founder wronged by his own partners and, more recently, as a litigant whose evidence simply did not hold up.

Both trials have now largely returned their verdicts. Neither has been kind to him.

What began as a boardroom fallout inside Pevans East Africa, the company that built SportPesa into Kenya’s most recognisable betting brand, has metastasised into a sprawling contest spanning a Kenyan trademark registry, the Court of Appeal in Nairobi, the Business and Property Courts in London, and a live criminal forgery probe. This is the story of how that fight was fought, and lost, on the record.

THE BRAND HE HELPED BUILD

Pevans East Africa launched SportPesa in 2014 and turned it into a national fixture, spending more than five billion shillings on marketing and sports sponsorship to get there. The company was, for a time, extraordinarily profitable. Shareholders split roughly 7.6 billion shillings of about 12.9 billion shillings in profit over the four and a half years to June 2019. Ndung’u says his share of that came to about 1.3 billion shillings, consistent with a stake he puts at roughly 17 percent of Pevans and a smaller holding in the company’s offshore parent, SportPesa Global Holdings Limited.

That run ended in July 2019, when Pevans lost its Kenyan betting licence amid a tax dispute with the Kenya Revenue Authority and a wider government crackdown on the gambling sector.

Its Bulgarian directors were deported. Operations went dark. What happened to the brand next is the root of everything that followed.

THE RELAUNCH THAT LEFT HIM OUT

In October 2020, SportPesa reappeared in Kenya under Milestone Games Limited, a company beneficially controlled by former Pevans shareholders Ronald Karauri and Robert Macharia, who held roughly 71 percent and 14 percent of it respectively.

Under the old Pevans structure, the two men had held only about three percent each. Ndung’u and fellow shareholder Asenath Wachera Maina, who together controlled around 38 percent of Pevans, say they were never told the Milestone arrangement was happening and were frozen out of the new entity entirely.

Ndung’u has consistently described the relaunch as an improper takeover of a Pevans-built asset, and alleged that Karauri and Macharia held undisclosed interests in both companies while taking decisions detrimental to Pevans.

Milestone has maintained the licensing and brand transfers it received were lawfully obtained, and Kenyan regulators and courts have, at various points, sided with both positions depending on which proceeding is examined.

A TRADEMARK SOLD FOR A FRACTION OF ITS WORTH

At the centre of the dispute sit two SportPesa trademarks, transferred from Pevans to the UK-based SportPesa Global Holdings Limited for 100,000 pounds apiece, in transactions beginning June 2, 2020, with Karauri signing the deed of assignment on Pevans’ behalf.

For a brand whose partners had collected 7.6 billion shillings in dividends in the preceding four and a half years, a combined price tag of roughly 200,000 pounds struck Ndung’u as suspiciously modest, and he has argued in filings that the low price disguised a real change of ownership rather than reflecting the brand’s true value.

Filings at the trademark registry compound the puzzle. Ndung’u has pointed out that the transfer application relied on a deed of assignment dated September 1, yet that document is missing from the registry file, with a June 2 deed attached in its place, suggesting Pevans and SPGHL both held the mark for an unexplained stretch between June and September 2020.

He has also questioned whether stamp duty, ordinarily two percent of a deal’s value, was ever paid, and noted that SPGHL’s financial statements do not record the 200,000 pound payment as either an expense or an intangible asset.

He has taken the matter to the Registrar of Trademarks and, in November 2025, back to the High Court, seeking to stop Milestone from using the SportPesa name pending determination of the case.

DILUTED FROM SEVENTEEN PERCENT TO UNDER ONE

A parallel and much larger battle was unfolding inside SportPesa Global Holdings Limited, the offshore company through which Ndung’u once served as non-executive chairman. Following a series of rights issues launched from October 2019, his stake fell from roughly 17 percent to somewhere between 0.8 and 1.5 percent, depending on which court filing is consulted, while Bulgarian shareholder Guerassim Nikolov’s position grew to around 46 percent and American shareholder Gene Grand’s to about 21 percent.

Ndung’u sued in London, arguing the allotments were a coordinated scheme to force him and Wachera out rather than a genuine capital call, and alleging that rights-issue notices were sent to the wrong addresses, that board minutes were falsified, and that he was never properly informed of key meetings.

THE ORDER THAT TURNED OUT TO BE FAKE

While the London case built, a separate crisis was unfolding in Nairobi’s Court of Appeal.

In February 2023, a three-judge bench dismissed Ndung’u’s bid to join a case challenging a consent that allowed Milestone to use the SportPesa trademark, relying in part on what was presented as a court order barring him from participating in any Pevans-related litigation.

The said orders were interim in nature and lapsed by operation of the law as they had not been extended.

That order was real, but it was never what it was made out to be. The genuine High Court order had restrained Ndung’u from dealing in Pevans for two weeks only, expiring January 24, 2023. The version placed before the Court of Appeal carried different wording altogether, describing a permanent injunction that did not exist.

The discrepancy triggered a criminal investigation into a senior lawyer, logged by the Directorate of Criminal Investigations under case number OB23/08/09/2025, and prompted the Judiciary to issue a rare public notice warning of a rise in forged court documents being used to sway rulings, sell property and block litigants.

On the strength of that discovery, the Court of Appeal reversed its own 2023 decision in April 2025, ruling that Ndung’u’s alleged expulsion as a Pevans shareholder required proper interrogation and that this was impossible unless he was joined as a party to the proceedings concerning the brand he says was taken from him.

LONDON DELIVERS A VERDICT, THEN A BILL

The reprieve in Nairobi did not carry over to London. On November 18, 2025, Mr Justice Edwin Johnson handed down a 190-page judgment in Ndung’u v SPG Limited, following a trial that ran across fourteen days between May and July 2025.

The findings cut in two directions at once.

Johnson agreed that SportPesa Global Holdings had breached sections 561 and 562 of the UK Companies Act 2006, the provisions protecting existing shareholders’ priority rights, and the company admitted to more than twenty separate statutory breaches during cross-examination. The judge also found that the two Bulgarian directors responsible for shelving a planned KPMG audit had given untruthful evidence about why it never happened.

Yet on the central allegations, the ones that mattered most to Ndung’u, Johnson ruled against him entirely. He found no forgery, no conspiracy to dilute his shareholding, and no unfairly prejudicial conduct warranting compensation, concluding that the dilution flowed from Ndung’u’s own failure to take up the rights offers rather than from any scheme to push him out.

The claimant has failed to establish that there has been any conduct of the affairs of the company which has caused him to suffer prejudice.

JUSTICE EDWIN JOHNSON, NOVEMBER 18, 2025

The costs followed swiftly. Ndung’u was ordered to pay 548,000 pounds to SPGHL and 1.6 million pounds to his co-directors, a combined bill of roughly 374 million shillings, due by January 9, 2026, with a further order blocking him from appealing the costs award until the wider fight concluded.

His counsel, Dr Ekuru Aukot, has argued the judgment is internally inconsistent, noting that Johnson’s own finding that Ndung’u could not afford to take up a 170,000 pound share offer sat awkwardly against bank records said to show access to nearly 900,000 pounds across personal and business accounts. Ndung’u was given until late January 2026 to lodge an appeal.

NAIROBI CLOSES ANOTHER DOOR

Kenya’s courts offered no reprieve either. On February 18, 2026, a three-judge Court of Appeal bench dismissed a fresh application by Ndung’u to reopen a long-settled dispute between Milestone Games and the Betting Control and Licensing Board, ruling that the application had no merit and awarding costs to Milestone. The judges held they could not set aside a February 2024 consent order that had never formally existed in the record before them, and noted the joinder question Ndung’u was trying to revisit had already been settled in April 2025.

Karauri called it vindication on two continents at once. SportPesa’s leadership used the ruling to draw a line under years of litigation, pairing it with fresh sponsorship pledges in boxing, rugby and rallying and a headline commitment of 1.12 billion shillings to Kenyan sport, a public pivot from courtroom defence to brand rehabilitation.

A STORY FOUGHT AS HARD ONLINE AS IN COURT

What has made the SportPesa dispute unusual is how much of it has been litigated in public rather than in filings alone.

For years, Ndung’u’s account of dispossession, a founding shareholder frozen out of the brand he helped build, circulated widely across Kenyan outlets and social media, often well ahead of any courtroom test of the underlying evidence.

That narrative shaped public sympathy long before Justice Johnson or the Court of Appeal weighed in.

SportPesa’s side answered in kind once the rulings came down, issuing statements framing each dismissal as proof of a pattern of vexatious litigation and media pressure, and moving quickly to fill the news cycle with sponsorship announcements rather than legal argument.

The result is two competing public records: a courtroom record that has now gone against Ndung’u twice in quick succession, and an online record still shaped by years of a founder’s-grievance narrative that the rulings have only partly displaced.

WHAT IS STILL UNRESOLVED

Two threads remain live even after London and Nairobi’s recent rulings. The forgery case tied to the fabricated 2023 court order, logged under OB23/08/09/2025, has not been publicly concluded, and it is the one part of this saga where a Kenyan court has already found, as fact, that a document was falsified to keep Ndung’u out of a case concerning his own former company.

And the constitutional petition Ndung’u filed in November 2025 over the trademark transfers remains before the Constitutional and Human Rights Division of the High Court, untouched by either the London judgment or the February 2026 Court of Appeal ruling, both of which concerned narrower procedural questions rather than the underlying legality of how the SportPesa brand changed hands.

For now, the balance of the record favours Milestone and SportPesa Global Holdings. Two courts on two continents have declined to find the fraud, forgery or conspiracy that Ndung’u alleged at the centre of his dilution and takeover claims.

What neither court has yet resolved is the narrower, more technical question that started this whole saga: how a brand that once threw off 7.6 billion shillings in dividends came to change hands twice for 200,000 pounds, on the strength of a deed of assignment the registry itself cannot produce.