Paul Ndung’u Claims SportPesa Has Wedged Out A Media War Against Him As He Files Appeal In UK Court To Recover His Shares

Paul Wanderi Ndung’u, the Kenyan entrepreneur at the centre of one of Africa’s most explosive corporate battles, has accused SportPesa-linked interests of orchestrating a coordinated media campaign designed to sabotage his ongoing appeal at the UK Court of Appeal, where he is fighting to recover shares he claims were fraudulently stripped from him through an elaborate dilution scheme engineered by Bulgarian directors with alleged ties to international organised crime.

In a scathing 17-page complaint addressed to the Managing Editor of Nation Media Group and dated January 31, 2026, Ndung’u names Business Daily columnist Jaindi Kisero as the latest weapon in what he describes as a calculated, sponsor-driven assault on his reputation timed to coincide with the most critical stage of his legal battle abroad.

The complaint, seen by Kenya Insights, is surgical in its counterattacks. Ndung’u does not merely dispute Kisero’s January 30 column. He dismantles it, paragraph by paragraph, producing court orders, affidavits, and documentary evidence to challenge virtually every major assertion the veteran columnist made.

At stake are shares in SportPesa Global Holdings Limited, a UK-registered company, where Ndung’u was a founding director and 17 percent shareholder before a rights issue in 2019 reduced his stake to a near-invisible 0.85 percent.

A UK High Court judge, Justice Edward Johnson, found in a November 2025 judgment that the company had breached sections 561 and 562 of the UK Companies Act 2006, laws specifically designed to protect shareholders from predatory dilution.

Offer letters had been sent to a non-existent address and to an email domain the Communications Authority of Kenya had already suspended for fraud. Ndung’u’s phone never rang while other shareholders were personally called.

Yet despite these damning findings, Justice Johnson ruled against Ndung’u, concluding he lacked the financial capacity to have subscribed the £170,000 required to take up the shares. It is this baffling conclusion that Ndung’u is now appealing, and it is this appeal, he says, that his enemies are desperate to derail through the press.

“This and other sponsored pieces, including those by bloggers, are calculated attempts to destabilise me during the pendency of my appeal before the UK Court of Appeal,” Ndung’u writes in the complaint.

He alleges the Kisero article mirrors content published on the X account of a blogger just four days earlier, suggesting both originate from the same sponsored source.

The bank evidence that Justice Johnson apparently set aside is staggering.

Court records show Ndung’u maintained a standing overdraft equivalent to approximately £416,000. His personal account held the equivalent of £500,000. His business account contained over £833,000. He had by early 2023 spent more than £300,000 pursuing the case alone and had committed in writing to invest up to £500,000.

His legal team has notified the Court of Appeal that Ndung’u is separately owed £2.4 million in cash he invested in SportPesa Holdings Limited in the Isle of Man between 2016 and 2017.

How a judge can find fraud, document it meticulously, then deny remedy because the victim supposedly lacked funds, funds the victim demonstrably possessed, is a question that now travels to the Court of Appeal.

Ndung’u is equally brutal about the Kisero article’s characterisation of events in Kenya.

Kisero wrote that Justice A.K. Ndungu of the Nairobi High Court had “affirmed Milestone Games’ lawful right to use the SportPesa trademark and dismissed claims of fraud and forgery,” declaring the story of the stolen brand legally settled.

Ndung’u calls this a fabrication.

He attaches the actual court orders from Justice Ndungu, which show the judge did the precise opposite.

In September 2022, Justice Ndungu suspended the SportPesa trademark licence issued to Milestone Games Limited and refused to adopt a consent the company had drafted without full board approval.

Five out of seven BCLB board members had sworn affidavits confirming the board never met to approve Milestone’s licence in the first place.

This is not a disputed interpretation of a grey ruling. These are court orders with specific operative clauses. If Kisero’s sources fed him the opposite narrative, either they lied to him or he did not ask for the paperwork.

The broader corporate landscape Ndung’u describes is grotesque in its detail. He alleges that in October 2020, Pevans East Africa Limited directors transferred assets including M-Pesa paybills, shortcodes and funds totalling KES 2.3 billion to Milestone Games Limited in direct violation of subsisting High Court money preservation orders. Safaricom PLC, he claims, facilitated the transfer of paybills and funds despite being formally served with those court orders.

He filed suit against Safaricom in July 2022. Safaricom, he says, failed to file a defence on more than six separate court occasions, resulting in an interlocutory judgment being entered against it in November 2022.

The criminal dimension of the saga extends far beyond share certificates and paybills. Guerassim Nikolov, the Bulgarian director who controlled SportPesa and who was deported from Kenya in 2019 alongside fellow director Gene Grand, has been linked by Bulgarian investigative journalists to gangland figures, credit card skimming operations and a 1994 armed kidnapping of Serbian truck drivers.

Bulgaria’s National Security Agency has described him as one of the main organisers of credit card draining operations worldwide.

His former lottery business partner in Kenya, Krasen Tenev, was later found guilty of five counts of forgery in Bulgaria and sentenced in absentia to 11 years in prison. Tenev remains on Interpol’s Red Notice watchlist.

These are the men who sponsored Arsenal and Everton, who plastered their brand across Kenyan stadiums, who presented themselves as legitimate businessmen while, according to financial analysis of Pevans’ 2018 accounts, channelling one-third of operating reserves totalling KES 5.3 billion to related parties offshore.

In that year alone, KES 1.4 billion flowed to companies wholly owned by Nikolov’s sister. Tech Pitch Limited paid Nikolov personal director’s remuneration of KES 196 million in 2018 while the company’s entire declared wage bill was KES 19.4 million, an accounting impossibility that speaks plainly to what was happening inside SportPesa’s books.

Despite their deportation, Nikolov and his associates continue to control the SportPesa brand through an ownership structure involving Milestone Games Limited, 72 percent ultimately owned by TPLC Holdings Limited, a UAE Free Zone Establishment controlled by the Bulgarians.

The deportation was theatrical. The control never ended.

In Kenya, the fraud has gone beyond corporate documents. The Court of Appeal in April 2025 overturned its own February 2023 ruling after discovering it had been misled by a forged court order.

The appellate bench, composed of Court of Appeal President Justice Daniel Musinga, Justice Mumbi Ngugi and Justice George Odunga, cited the intricacies of fraud and forgery in its reversal.

The court found there was no injunction against Ndung’u, that he retained full rights to participate in derivative actions on behalf of Pevans, and that his exclusion from proceedings had violated his constitutional rights under Article 50.

Following those findings, the Kenyan Judiciary issued a public notice through the Law Society of Kenya warning about criminal activity involving forged court documents, decrees and orders. The notice described a budding criminal activity involving generating and presenting forged court documents with intent to defraud. That notice came after a SportPesa-related case. The Business Daily itself ran an editorial on October 9, 2025 calling on the DCI to probe the fake court orders scandal.

Ndung’u also lays out a comprehensive trademark fraud case currently before the Constitutional Court.

He alleges the SportPesa and Spesa trademarks owned by Pevans were transferred to SportPesa Global Holdings Limited, a UK company not registered in Kenya, in violation of multiple statutes including the Companies Act, the Stamp Duty Act and the Tax Procedures Act. No stamp duty was paid. No shareholder approval was obtained. The assignment certificates were backdated. No application fees were paid.

The goodwill purportedly worth £200,000 was never actually paid. KIPI board chairman Allan Kosgey wrote to Ndung’u’s lawyer Dr Ekuru Aukot in September 2025 acknowledging the complaint and promising compliance with applicable law and regulations.

Against this backdrop, the Kisero article’s declaration that the litigation is “effectively settled” and that SportPesa can now enjoy an “industry reset” is not merely premature. It is, in Ndung’u’s characterisation, part of the campaign itself.

Ndung’u demands a full-page paid apology from Kisero and threatens legal proceedings if Nation Media Group does not provide him equal space to rebut the column.

He has directed his lawyers at Ekuru Aukot and Co to take necessary steps if the matter is not resolved to his satisfaction.

What remains unresolved is the larger question the UK Court of Appeal must now answer.

If a court documents that company law was broken, that offer letters were sent to phantom addresses and shut-down email accounts, that directors lied under oath about auditing obligations, that a shareholder with nearly £900,000 in accessible funds was systematically excluded from a rights issue, but still denies remedy, what exactly does corporate law protect?

For Ndung’u, the answer may come from London. For Kenya, the answer is already written in court files that detail billions transferred in defiance of court orders, trademarks donated without payment, licences issued without board approval, and forged documents filed to manipulate judicial outcomes.

SportPesa did not merely build a betting empire.

According to the evidence documented in courts on two continents, it built a machine for stripping shareholders of their stakes, extracting cash through offshore entities, corrupting institutions and then using media, litigation and criminal forgery to bury the evidence.

The machine is still running. Ndung’u intends to stop it.