A New York-listed bank has gone to war with Kenya’s top detectives to stop them from ever questioning its country boss over a tea factory loan and buried in the legal paperwork is a warning that the man accusing him of wrongdoing has, at various points, been just as unwelcome in his own boardroom.
Citibank N.A. Kenya is not merely defending Martin Mugambi in court. It is trying to make him permanently un-investigable.
The petition filed at the Milimani High Court does not ask for a fair hearing on the merits of the Sh261.1 million ($2.02 million) facility advanced to Kiru Tea Factory Company Ltd in Murang’a; it asks the court to declare, as a matter of constitutional law, that the Directorate of Criminal Investigations (DCI) has no business looking at the transaction at all.
The bank has already secured interim orders freezing the probe.
The full hearing falls on September 17 coincidentally the same date the High Court is due to rule on an unrelated but equally politically charged matter, the JKIA-Adani concession petition, a scheduling quirk that will make that Wednesday one of the most consequential court dates of the year.
A Loan Approved in the Middle of a Coup
The facility at the centre of the fight was approved in September 2019 and disbursed in March 2021 precisely the window in which Kiru Tea Factory was tearing itself apart. Rival boards were holding competing annual general meetings days apart, rival chairmen were claiming legitimacy, and Kenya’s courts were handing down contempt findings against directors accused of defying orders not to interfere with the factory’s leadership.
Detectives now want to know which of those competing boards actually authorised the borrowing, whether the resolutions presented to Citibank were genuine, and the question with the most explosive potential where the money actually went, including claims that some of it moved toward accounts linked to Litein Tea Factory Company Ltd, a separate KTDA-managed factory more than 200 kilometres away in Kericho.
Citibank’s own court filings do not dispute that Kiru was in crisis when the loan went through. Its defence is narrower and, in banking terms, more consequential: that whatever happened inside Kiru’s boardroom is a governance dispute for the civil courts, and that a bank cannot be expected to litigate a client’s internal legitimacy before it lends.
Investigators, according to reporting on the court filings, are examining this as the specific offence of negligently accepting a credit application a framing that treats the bank’s due-diligence failure, not just the borrower’s alleged forgery, as the crime.
The Complainant Who Keeps Losing His Own Chair
Here is the detail that has gone largely unremarked in coverage of the case so far: the man whose complaint triggered the DCI probe, Kiru Tea Factory chairman Chege Kirundi, has spent much of the past year fighting to hold onto power in exactly the kind of boardroom coup he is now accusing others of exploiting.
Kirundi was elected national chairman of KTDA Holdings the umbrella company controlling all 54 smallholder tea factories, Kiru included in January 2025. By October 2025 he had been ousted from that national chairmanship, replaced by former chairman Enos Njeru, in a reshuffle that also swept out the vice-chairman. The following months brought yet more churn at the top of KTDA Holdings, including the death in office of one short-lived chairman in May 2026.
None of this makes Kirundi’s underlying allegations against Citibank and the Kiru loan false. But it does mean the DCI’s case rests substantially on a complaint from a figure who has, within the same twelve-month window, been on both sides of exactly the kind of disputed-legitimacy boardroom warfare he alleges tainted the 2019 loan application. Kirundi has remained chairman of Kiru Tea Factory itself throughout the turbulence at the national holding company — a detail that matters, because it is Kiru’s board legitimacy, not KTDA Holdings’, that sits at the heart of the criminal complaint.
Whoever controls the story of who “really” ran Kiru’s board in 2019 controls the outcome of a case that could put a foreign bank’s Kenya CEO in the dock.
Why Target the CEO, and Why Now
Martin Mugambi is not a junior relationship manager who signed off on a routine facility. He is a career Citi executive who ran the bank’s operations in Zambia, held senior corporate finance roles across Citi’s Sub-Saharan Africa business, and returned to head Citibank Kenya’s East Africa cluster around the time the Kiru facility was approved. Naming him personally in a criminal probe is not incidental it is leverage.
Citibank N.A. is a federally chartered US national bank whose parent, Citigroup, trades on the New York Stock Exchange, which means a criminal file against its Kenya country chief carries regulatory consequences that reach well beyond Nairobi’s courts and into disclosure obligations, internal risk reviews and relationships with US supervisors.
The timing lines up with a much larger reckoning underway across the tea sector. Multi-agency audits into KTDA-linked borrowing, procurement and inter-factory debt have already surfaced hundreds of millions of shillings in questionable transactions, and a presidential directive ordered a forensic inquiry into the agency’s operations.
A criminal file naming a foreign bank’s chief executive over one factory’s loan does not exist in a vacuum it lands inside a live fight over who gets to control narrative and leverage as that broader tea-sector reckoning plays out.
What Citibank Is Really Afraid Of
The bank’s petition asks for far more than protection for one executive. It seeks a blanket declaration restraining the DCI, the Attorney-General and the Director of Public Prosecutions from pursuing the bank or its staff over the Kiru facility at all, on the theory that treating a disputed commercial lending decision as a criminal matter would expose every bank in Kenya to what its lawyers call weaponised investigations rooted in shareholder and boardroom disputes rather than genuine fraud. For an institution that has operated in Kenya since 1974, posted roughly Sh6.5 billion in profit in its last reported year and repatriated more than Sh10 billion to its US parent, a precedent allowing the DCI to second-guess a completed credit decision years after disbursement is viewed internally as a threat to how commercial banking itself is policed in Kenya.
That is precisely why the DCI, and Kirundi’s camp, are unlikely to fold quietly. If Citibank succeeds in walling off a completed loan from criminal scrutiny purely because the dispute originated in a corporate governance fight, it hands every bank facing an awkward loan a ready-made constitutional shield — provided the borrower’s leadership was contested at the time. Kenyan prosecutors will argue that is exactly the kind of shield that lets forged board resolutions move Sh261 million with impunity.
What September 17 Will Decide
The High Court’s ruling will not just determine whether Martin Mugambi is ever summoned, arrested or charged. It will decide whether Kenya’s criminal justice system can reach into a bank’s lending file once a loan is already disbursed and the dispute has migrated into open boardroom warfare — or whether a foreign lender’s constitutional petition can close that door for good. For the roughly 8,400 smallholder farmers whose leaf underwrites Kiru Tea Factory, and the tens of thousands more across KTDA’s 54 factories watching their own agency cycle through chairmen with dizzying speed, the case is a reminder that the money moving through their factory’s accounts remains a prize fought over by people who answer to courtrooms and regulators, not to them.
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