Citibank wants a Kenyan court to declare its Kenya CEO permanently off-limits to detectives. Six months ago, in a case nobody has connected to this one until now, the same court already answered that question for Safaricom and the answer was no.

Citibank N.A. Kenya’s petition to shield chief executive Martin Mugambi from DCI investigation over the Sh261.5 million ($2.02 million) Kiru Tea Factory loan is filed as HCCHRPET/E373/2026 at the Milimani Constitutional and Human Rights Division.

That filing detail matters more than it looks.

The very same division has already ruled, in a strikingly similar fight, that a company’s constitutional petition cannot be used to wall off its executives from a live criminal investigation and that ruling did not go Safaricom’s way.

The Precedent Citibank Would Rather You Didn’t Notice

Earlier this year, Safaricom PLC petitioned the same court to stop the DCI and the Director of Public Prosecutions from investigating or prosecuting eighteen of its corporate officials over a disputed 2016 tender involving ATL/BTL Creatives and Digital Services.

Safaricom’s arguments were, point for point, the arguments Citibank is now making: that the summonses lacked adequate notice and factual detail, that pursuing executives breached their right to fair administrative action, and that a commercial dispute was being dressed up as a crime.

The court rejected all of it. In a 42-page decision, the judge dismissed Safaricom’s petition in its entirety, ruling that criminal investigations are governed by their own penal statutes rather than administrative-law fairness standards, and that forcing detectives to disclose the full evidentiary basis of a probe before recording statements would defeat the purpose of investigating in the first place.

That single ruling knocks out two of the three constitutional pillars Citibank’s petition leans on: the claim that a two-day notice period is constitutionally defective, and the claim that Mugambi is entitled to know the DCI’s full case against him before he is questioned.

A bank that built its defence on the same constitutional scaffolding a court dismantled in January is not filing from a position of strength, it is filing against a wall its own industry peer already hit.

The Bank That Wouldn’t Say His Name

A curious detail buried in the court papers has gone unremarked: Citibank’s petition does not centre its prayers on Martin Mugambi by name.

Filed on behalf of the bank, the pleadings repeatedly refer to the person under investigation only as its “employee” or the “Interested Party,” asking the court to bar the DCI, the Attorney-General and the DPP from summoning, arresting, charging or otherwise requiring that employee to record statements.

Public reporting on the case has consistently named the employee as Mugambi, the bank’s own CEO but the petition’s own drafting choice, treating its chief executive as an interchangeable staff member rather than naming him outright, reads less like an oversight and more like a bank trying to keep its most senior officer’s name out of the pleadings it knows will attract press coverage.

Why the CBK’s Silence Won’t Save Citibank

Citibank’s defence leans heavily on the fact that no complaint has ever reached the Central Bank of Kenya over the Kiru facility, and that no CBK audit has flagged the loan.

That argument mistakes parallel oversight for exclusive oversight.

The CBK’s mandate under the Banking Act to supervise lending practices runs alongside, not above, the DCI’s constitutional mandate under Article 244 to investigate crime.

A clean regulatory file has never, on its own, been enough to stop a criminal complaint from a private party in this case Kiru Tea Factory chairman Chege Kirundi from triggering an independent police investigation.

If anything, the gap between the two regimes is the real story: a bank can be in full compliance with its prudential regulator while its chief executive is simultaneously exposed to arrest over the same transaction, and neither regulator’s silence binds the other’s jurisdiction.

What Citibank Would Have to Prove and Hasn’t

To succeed where Safaricom failed, Citibank’s petition needs the High Court to find something Safaricom’s petition never managed to show: that the DCI’s investigation is not merely procedurally brisk but driven by bad faith, or mala fides, entirely disconnected from any genuine inquiry into the Kiru loan.

Short notice periods, broadly worded summonses and the implicit threat of prosecution for non-attendance have already been treated by this court as ordinary features of police work, not grounds to shut down a probe.

Citibank’s petition, as filed, argues procedural unfairness the same ground the court has already ruled insufficient.

None of this means Citibank loses automatically on September 17.

The bank can still argue that its case is distinguishable that, unlike Safaricom’s, its dispute centres on the specific and previously untested claim that “negligently accepting a credit application” is not a recognised offence at all, rather than a complaint about notice periods.

That argument was not before the court in the Safaricom matter and remains, on paper, Citibank’s strongest card.

But every procedural plank underneath it the fair-administrative-action claim, the demand for pre-charge disclosure, the objection to summons wording has already been tested in the same courthouse this year and found wanting.

The Wider Reckoning

Strip away the tea and the banking jargon, and what is forming in Nairobi’s Constitutional and Human Rights Division is a body of case law establishing that Kenyan boardrooms telco or bank, foreign-owned or not cannot use the constitution as a shield to keep their most senior officers away from DCI questioning.

Safaricom tested it first and lost.

Citibank is now the second major test case, betting that a genuinely novel legal argument about what counts as a crime can succeed where a fair-hearing argument already failed.

Whichever way the High Court rules on September 17, corporate Kenya will be reading the judgment less for what it says about one bank loan than for what it confirms about how far the DCI’s reach now extends into the executive suite.