Salute Holdings Limited, the parent company behind Salute iWorld East Africa’s largest authorised Apple reseller has been placed under receivership at the instruction of Imperial Bank Limited (In Liquidation), Kenya Insights can report, in a move that strips founder Vivek Mehra and his board of every operational power they have held since 1999.
Kamal Anantroy Bhatt of Anant Bhatt LLP was appointed receiver and manager of Salute Holdings on 5 May 2026 under the Insolvency Act, 2015, acting on the instructions of a bank that regulators shut down for fraud back when the iPhone 6 was still Apple’s flagship device.
The public notice leaves no ambiguity about who now runs the company: no director, manager, supplier or customer may buy, sell, transfer or otherwise deal with a single Salute asset without Bhatt’s written consent. Creditors have 30 days to lodge claims. The directors were given just 12 days to produce a full statement of affairs.
A Sales Launch and a Receivership Notice, Eight Months Apart
What Kenya Insights has established is the timeline that the public notices alone do not tell. As recently as 5 November 2025, Salute iWorld was in full commercial flight, unveiling Apple’s iPhone 17 series at a glitzy Nairobi launch and describing the moment as a leap forward in mobile technology.
The company told the press it was running nine stores across the country and had structured financing partnerships with KCB Group, Standard Chartered, NCBA Loop and I&M Bank, alongside buy-now-pay-later providers Flexpay and Spotit, so that ordinary Kenyans could walk out with a brand-new handset on credit.
Barely six months later, the company that had just brokered installment plans through four of Kenya’s most prominent banks was itself being stripped of its own bank accounts, stock and lease agreements by a receiver acting for a fifth.
The contrast is stark: multiple licensed lenders were actively extending consumer credit against Salute’s shopfronts at the very moment its underlying corporate debt to Imperial Bank was already the subject of enforcement proceedings. None of the financing partners named in Salute’s own marketing material has commented publicly on the receivership, and it remains unclear what, if anything, they knew about the company’s exposure to a lender already deep inside a liquidation process.
“The powers of the Receiver extend to all assets and undertakings of the company.” — Receiver’s notice, 2026
From Receivership to Liquidation: A Decade of Slow Death
Imperial Bank was first placed under statutory management on 13 October 2015 after the Central Bank of Kenya uncovered a fraud scheme, run through undisclosed insider lending, that left a hole estimated in the tens of billions of shillings.
Its late managing director, Abdulmalek Janmohamed, sat at the centre of a lending machine that funnelled depositor money to related parties. In June 2020, KCB carved out roughly Sh3.2 billion in assets and liabilities from the wreckage to begin paying protected depositors.
But years of receivership failed to rehabilitate what remained of the institution, and in December 2021 the Central Bank formally directed Imperial Bank into liquidation on the advice of the Kenya Deposit Insurance Corporation (KDIC), which has run the wind-down ever since.
That distinction matters more than it might appear. A bank in receivership is, at least nominally, being nursed back to health.
A bank in liquidation is being dismantled for parts.
Every asset Bhatt now recovers from Salute, Sparetech, Mawa Dairy or Nafas World Auto goes into a final, finite pool being divided among depositors and creditors who have already waited more than a decade many of whom, KDIC’s own notices show, are still lodging claims for protected deposits as recently as 2024.
One Receiver, Four Companies, One Month
Salute Holdings is not an isolated target. Bhatt’s appointment over the Apple retailer came within weeks of three other receiverships tied to the same collapsed lender: Sparetech Trading Company Limited on 17 April 2026, Nafas World Auto (K) Limited on 23 April 2026, and Mawa Dairy Farm Limited in the same window.
Kenya Insights understands this is the most concentrated single-month enforcement sweep Imperial Bank’s liquidator has carried out since the wind-down order took effect, spanning a motor vehicle importer, a dairy operation and now the country’s most visible consumer electronics brand.
The pattern points to a liquidator racing a clock. Insolvency practitioners acting for banks in liquidation are typically under pressure to crystallise recoveries before security interests lapse, guarantors restructure, or underlying businesses deteriorate further.
That four unrelated companies, spanning three entirely different sectors, were swept into receivership within roughly three weeks of each other suggests Imperial Bank’s legal team has been working through a backlog of secured but dormant debt with unusual urgency in 2026.
A Founding Family Fighting the Same Liquidator
The Salute takeover also lands alongside a separate, higher-profile legal battle over the very same liquidation. The Doshi family associated with Imperial Bank’s founding ownership has been locked in litigation with KDIC and the Central Bank, most recently before the Court of Appeal, arguing that once liquidation payouts to depositors resume, little may be left to satisfy a claim of more than US$7.2 million that the family says it is separately owed.
In other words: even as Bhatt seizes operating businesses to feed the depositor pool, the people who built the bank that collapsed it are still in court fighting over who gets paid first from what is left. It is a reminder that eleven years on, Imperial Bank’s collapse has not finished producing casualties it has simply changed their shape, from failed depositors in 2015 to seized businesses and unresolved family litigation in 2026.
What Happens to iWorld’s Customers Now
For the thousands of Kenyans who bought an iPhone, Mac or Apple Watch from iWorld on an instalment plan through KCB, Standard Chartered, NCBA Loop or I&M Bank, the receivership raises immediate practical questions that neither Bhatt’s notice nor Imperial Bank has yet addressed publicly: whether Apple-certified warranty and repair services will continue uninterrupted, whether existing financing agreements survive a change of control, and whether any of the group’s other trading arms; SportsPlanet, the sportswear chain, or Sensations, its premium audio business face the same fate as iWorld’s flagship stores.
Salute’s directors, including Mehra, have been ordered to hand over a complete statement of the company’s affairs within days.
What that document reveals about the scale of the debt behind Kenya’s biggest Apple counter may determine whether the brand survives receivership as a going concern or is broken up asset by asset, the way Bhatt’s other three 2026 receiverships increasingly suggest is the more likely outcome.
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