THE FIRM IN THE DOCK: How Kaplan and Stratton Became the Most Scrutinised Law Firm in Kenya

In the annals of Kenyan legal history, few institutions have carried the weight of Kaplan and Stratton Advocates with as much quiet authority as that firm has for decades.

Founded in the colonial era and now commanding a client portfolio that spans blue-chip corporations, international development banks, insurance conglomerates and the country’s wealthiest families, it has long projected an image of impeccable legal craftsmanship.

That image is now in serious jeopardy.

Within the space of a single week in February 2026, two senior partners of the same firm have found themselves at the centre of separate but thematically identical storms: allegations of document fraud, manufactured evidence and the manipulation of Kenya’s highest judicial processes for private gain.

The convergence of these two matters has sent tremors through the Nairobi bar and raised questions that will not be easily answered about the culture, oversight and accountability within one of the country’s most prestigious commercial law practices.

THE DEAD MAN’S SIGNATURE

The first and more advanced of the two matters concerns the estate of James Boro Karugu, Kenya’s second Attorney General, who died on November 9, 2022, aged 86. Karugu was, by every account, a man of towering legal intellect and fierce personal integrity.

He had resigned as Attorney General under President Daniel arap Moi on June 2, 1981, just fifteen months into the role, rather than bend his principles to the pressures of the administration.

He retreated to Kiamara, his coffee farm in Kiambu, named his holding company Mathara Holdings after the syllables of his late wife Margaret Githara’s name, and spent four decades quietly building one of the most substantial private estates in the country’s history.

That estate, when it came to be contested in the courts, encompassed over 753 acres of land spread across Nairobi, Nakuru, Murang’a, Kwale and Kiambu Counties, Treasury bonds valued at Sh404.7 million, shares in Kenya Power, Nation Media Group and Maramba Holdings, as well as a commercial building along Kenyatta Avenue in Nairobi’s central business district. Control of Mathara Holdings and its ten subsidiaries forms the beating heart of the dispute.

Weeks after Karugu was buried at his Kiamara farm, a will dated April 2, 2014 was presented to family members at a hotel in Kiambu.

Alongside it came a trust deed establishing the JBK Foundation, a vehicle that, if recognised by the courts, would place the entirety of Karugu’s assets not directly distributed by the will into a trust administered by named executors. The documents were unknown to the family during the former AG’s lifetime and emerged only after his burial.

Victoria Nyambura Karugu, the former Attorney General’s firstborn daughter, who had managed the family’s business affairs as Chief Executive of Mathara Holdings after her father’s dementia took hold in 2015, was having none of it.

She told investigators the documents were fabrications.

She pointed to a 2010 will drawn up by Patel and Patel Advocates as representing her father’s authentic last wishes. And she lodged a formal complaint with the Directorate of Criminal Investigations.

What followed that complaint was, by the account of investigators, one of the more disturbing forensic discoveries in recent Kenyan legal history.

Chief Inspector Duncan Maina, acting on behalf of the DPP and the DCI, filed an affidavit in the High Court detailing how forensic examiners discovered that the questioned documents bore grammatical errors, arithmetic mistakes, spelling blunders and erratic page numbering suggesting the documents had been assembled from multiple sources.

The execution page allegedly bore deliberate obscurity concealing its page number, raising red flags about tampering.

“The impugned Will and Trust Deed as presented bear several drafting concerns that do not resonate with professional standards of a man of the stature of the deceased, an impeccable lawyer and second Attorney General of the Republic of Kenya,” investigators stated in their affidavit. The initials appearing on all pages of the two questioned documents, attributed to Karugu, were declared a forgery.

Witnesses gave conflicting accounts of the will’s execution, with some admitting they signed on different days. Crucially, none could confirm witnessing the settlor or other trustees sign the document, a fundamental requirement for valid execution.

One of the petitioners initially resisted producing the original documents for forensic examination before eventually surrendering copies. The examiner found that the questioned initials and signatures were not those of James Boro Karugu.

On December 23, 2025, the Director of Public Prosecutions approved charges for forgery, uttering false documents and conspiracy to defraud. Six individuals were to face prosecution.

Among those named were Karugu’s son Eric Mwaura Karugu, Jane Wangechi Kabiu, William Kimani Richu, Eliud Mwaura Gatambia, Joshua Mwaura Kimani and lawyer Peter Mbuthia Gachuhi, a senior partner at Kaplan and Stratton.

THE LAWYER WHO BARELY KNEW THE MAN

The inclusion of Peter Mbuthia Gachuhi in the list of suspects is not simply sensational. It is, to those who have followed this succession battle, the logical culmination of a pattern that Nyambura Karugu had been pointing to for some time.

Gachuhi, together with Joshua Mwaura Kimani and Eliud Mwaura Gatambia, had filed a petition for a grant of probate on July 5, 2023, through Kaplan and Stratton Advocates, seeking permission for the three to execute the contested will.

Nyambura alleged that Gachuhi had met her father only once in the eight years preceding his death, was not present at his funeral or memorial service, and was not a close friend or confidant of the former Attorney General.

She further alleged a conflict of interest with damning precision.

Gachuhi and Kaplan and Stratton had previously represented Karugu in 2016 when Lucy Githire Muthoni claimed to have been married to the former Attorney General.

The firm was also instructed in a similar claim by another woman, Wambui Mwangi. In that matter, they were instructed to deny all claims but also to seek a settlement confirming that Muthoni and Karugu had never been married.

For Nyambura, a lawyer who had represented the man in such intimate personal matters and was now presenting himself as the executor of the man’s estate under a will of highly questionable authenticity presented a conflict that went well beyond the merely procedural.

In a separate affidavit filed in the constitutional petition proceedings, Nyambura alleged that the motive of Senior Counsel Fred Ojiambo and Kaplan and Stratton was to be found in what she described as a very profitable retainer by the purported executors of the forged will and trust deed.

Lawyer Fred Ojiambo.

She argued that the assets of the deceased would be placed under the direct control of Kaplan and Stratton until their full depletion, to the grave prejudice of the legitimate beneficiaries.

THE ATTEMPT TO SILENCE THE STATE

When it became clear that prosecution was imminent, the six suspects moved.

On January 19, 2026, they secured ex parte conservatory orders from the High Court, restraining the DPP and the DCI from summoning, arresting or charging them in relation to the will.

The orders were obtained, according to lawyers representing Nyambura, shortly before the suspects were due to be arraigned. Murgor and Murgor Advocates wrote to the DPP characterising the timing as deliberate and designed to pre-empt imminent prosecution.

The letter also accused Fred Ojiambo of previously obstructing investigations by declining to produce the original will for forensic examination.

In correspondence dated May 12, 2025, Ojiambo had reportedly claimed that the document was being held by his firm under the authority of the succession court, a claim the complainant’s lawyers characterised as false.

They argued that no court order existed authorising the firm to withhold the document and that the conduct amounted to interference with lawful investigations.

When the matter came before Justice Bahati Mwamuye, it was Ojiambo himself who appeared in court on behalf of Gachuhi and the other petitioners.

He told the court he had not been served with the relevant documents. The judge directed that the matter be mentioned on March 16 for further directions.

The Attorney General, Dorcas Oduor, has now formally entered the arena on the side of the prosecution.

In grounds of opposition dated February 17, 2026, she urged the Constitutional and Human Rights Division of the High Court to dismiss the petition by Gachuhi and his co-petitioners, arguing that criminal investigations cannot be stopped merely because succession proceedings are ongoing.

The State was blunt in its characterisation of the petition.

It described the application seeking conservatory orders as incompetent, misconceived and an abuse of the court process.

It argued that the existence of High Court Succession Cause No. E916 of 2023 does not bar investigators from probing whether criminal offences were committed. It reminded the court that the Family Division has no jurisdiction to determine criminal culpability, including offences such as forgery.

The AG stated that forgery is a criminal offence under the Penal Code and cannot be resolved in a family or succession court, adding that the existence of a succession case does not stop criminal investigations.

THE SECOND STORM: TUJU AND THE BILLION-SHILLING PROPERTY

Before the ink had dried on the Attorney General’s opposition papers in the Karugu matter, the firm found itself facing a second and separately explosive allegation.

On February 16, 2026, former Cabinet Secretary and Jubilee Party Secretary General Raphael Tuju walked into DCI headquarters and formally recorded a criminal complaint against Senior Counsel Fred Ojiambo, the most senior lawyer at Kaplan and Stratton and the very same advocate who had appeared in court the previous day to defend Gachuhi.

Raphael Tuju.

At the centre of Tuju’s complaint is a prime property in Karen valued at Ksh 1.5 billion.

The dispute traces its origins to a commercial loan extended by the East African Development Bank to Tuju’s company, Dari Ltd, and enforcement proceedings the bank subsequently initiated against the property.

What began as a loan dispute has, in Tuju’s account, metastasised into something far more sinister.

Tuju told journalists outside DCI headquarters that he had written to the DCI ten days prior to personally presenting himself and had arrived bearing what he described as documentary evidence of criminal conduct by Ojiambo.

At the core of his allegations was a claim that Ojiambo and other advocates at the firm had procured and manufactured falsehoods from a former Kenya Country Manager of the East African Development Bank and deposited those fabricated falsehoods in sworn affidavits filed before both the High Court and the Supreme Court of Kenya.

He alleged the affidavits were presented as having been properly commissioned before a Commissioner for Oaths when they were no such thing.

If that allegation is established, it would mean that sworn documents presented to Kenya’s apex court were fraudulent.

Tuju also alleged that Ojiambo had persuaded the High Court to recognise a diplomatic immunity claim on behalf of the East African Development Bank, an immunity that Tuju flatly asserts does not exist in law, thereby freezing a separate criminal matter before the Magistrates Court for over a year.

Most dramatically, he told investigators of what he described as a fake international warrant of arrest emanating from a Ugandan magistrate’s court and deployed against him as an instrument of intimidation.

Ojiambo, reached for comment, dismissed the allegations with equanimity. “We haven’t falsified any affidavit on any matter whatsoever,” he said. He maintained he was unaware of the specifics of Tuju’s complaint at the time but denied categorically that he or his firm had engaged in any of the alleged conduct.

Tuju was not prepared to extend the same courtesy.

Standing outside DCI headquarters with his lawyer Duncan Okach at his side, he delivered what has since become one of the most quoted lines in recent Kenyan legal discourse. “Fred Ojiambo is a Bible-carrying fraud with a fake British accent,” he declared.

He then deliberately drew a line between the two crises afflicting the same firm.

He noted that Gachuhi, his colleague at Kaplan and Stratton, was already facing prosecution over the alleged forgery of former Attorney General Karugu’s will and asked, pointedly, what this said about the institution they both called home.

“If this can happen to persons like the late former AG James Boro Karugu and me, who have had the privilege of serving this country in high office, what is the situation for other Kenyans who cannot afford to engage teams of lawyers?” Tuju said.

A FIRM UNDER THE LENS

Kaplan and Stratton has not issued any formal institutional statement in response to either matter. The firm’s website continues to list both Ojiambo and Gachuhi among its senior practitioners without amendment.

Ojiambo is described as Senior Partner and Gachuhi as Partner, with his practice areas spanning civil litigation, banking, competition law and arbitration. He was admitted to the bar in 1990 and is a Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Arbitrators.

The convergence of these allegations against practitioners of the same firm within a single week has raised uncomfortable questions for Kenya’s legal establishment that go beyond the guilt or innocence of any individual.

They touch on the adequacy of internal governance structures within large commercial law firms, the conflicts of interest that can arise when a firm simultaneously advises an individual client and later seeks to profit from that client’s estate, and the capacity of Kenya’s criminal justice system to hold members of the bar to the same standard it holds everyone else.

The Law Society of Kenya has not publicly commented on either matter.

WHAT COMES NEXT

The constitutional petition filed by Gachuhi and his co-petitioners is scheduled for further directions before Justice Bahati Mwamuye on March 16, 2026. The succession cause concerning Karugu’s estate is also due for mention in March.

The DCI complaint by Tuju against Ojiambo is at the investigative stage, and no charges have been preferred. Both Ojiambo and Gachuhi are entitled to the presumption of innocence and have denied wrongdoing.

But the trajectory of both matters is clear enough. The State has made its position known. The Attorney General has described the attempt to halt the Karugu prosecution as an abuse of process.

The DCI has before it a formal complaint implicating a Senior Counsel in manufactured affidavits placed before the Supreme Court.

And two daughters of a man once described as Kenya’s most principled Attorney General are watching a legal institution attempt to inherit their father’s empire.

For James Boro Karugu, the barefoot boy who once sat in the gallery of the High Court mesmerised by men in white wigs, the irony is one that history will not easily forgive.

Allegations reported in this article are contested and subject to ongoing judicial proceedings. All parties are presumed innocent unless and until found guilty by a court of competent jurisdiction.