TRUST BETRAYED: How Senior DTB Bank Insiders Allegedly Looted Sh149 Million From a Customer’s Account Over Five Years

The customer had no idea her money was gone. For years, Rozina Nurdin Patelia trusted Diamond Trust Bank with a foreign-currency account held at the Parklands branch. She had no reason to suspect that the very people entrusted with safeguarding her savings had allegedly been picking it apart, one fraudulent instruction letter and one forged withdrawal slip at a time.

On Tuesday, three people appeared before a Milimani court and heard 68 charges read against them. Salimah Ameen Pirbhai, 55, the former branch manager at DTB Parklands, Aabid Alkarim Kassam, 43, her former assistant, and Tazim Sidi Vassanji, 57, are accused of a scheme that allegedly drained more than Sh149.3 million from Ms Patelia’s Great Britain Pounds account between 2016 and 2021. All three denied the charges.

The charges include conspiracy to defraud, stealing, money laundering and forgery. The magnitude, the duration, and the seniority of those accused have left the Kenyan banking industry with uncomfortable questions that do not go away just because three people pleaded not guilty.

The very people entrusted with safeguarding her savings had allegedly been picking it apart, one fraudulent instruction letter and one forged withdrawal slip at a time.

A SCHEME BUILT ON PAPER AND TRUST

According to the charge sheet filed by the Director of Public Prosecutions, the alleged theft did not happen in a single act of recklessness. It was allegedly methodical and sustained.

Kassam bears the bulk of the individual counts. He is accused of stealing Sh58.2 million from Ms Patelia’s account between October 2016 and April 2018, and a further Sh10.9 million between June 2019 and October 2021, all while serving as assistant branch manager at Parklands. On top of these, he faces charges of forging withdrawal slips for GBP 8,500 and GBP 8,700 in June 2019, and allegedly generating fraudulent withdrawal documents amounting to more than GBP 7.6 million. He is further accused of creating false email instructions purporting to have come from Ms Patelia, authorising the liquidation of multiple fixed deposit accounts between 2016 and 2018.

A particularly damning allegation is that Kassam prepared a false instruction letter dated June 5, 2019, purporting that Ms Patelia had authorised cash withdrawals from her account. The DPP further alleges that all three suspects jointly forged another instruction letter four days later making the same claim. The document trail, if proven, points to a level of premeditation that would suggest the perpetrators were not operating in panic, but in practiced confidence.

The allegations against Pirbhai carry an additional dimension that is deeply unsettling. She is accused not only of the joint charges with Kassam and Vassanji but also of personally stealing Sh39.6 million from the bank on June 4, 2025, and of preparing a fake bank statement the following week with intent to deceive. That allegation, if proven, means that the alleged misconduct was still ongoing last year, nearly a decade after investigators say the first thefts took place.

INVESTIGATIONS AND THE LONG DELAY

Court records show that investigations into the alleged theft only began in July 2025. That is a striking detail. The alleged scheme, according to the prosecution, started in October 2016. The question of how Sh149.3 million could allegedly be siphoned from a single customer’s account over five years without triggering internal red flags goes to the heart of what banks owe their customers.

The three accused persons cooperated with the Banking Fraud Investigations Unit once the probe began, according to submissions made in court. Their lawyers argued that they had attended every questioning session since July 2025 and had never attempted to leave the country. The court was sufficiently persuaded. Kassam was released on a bond of Sh2 million or a cash bail alternative of Sh500,000. Pirbhai and Vassanji were each released on a bond of Sh1 million or Sh300,000 cash bail.

The case returns on June 17, 2026, when the prosecution is expected to have supplied witness statements and documentary evidence to the defence. Hearing dates will be set thereafter. In Kenya’s creaking criminal justice machinery, convictions in bank fraud cases frequently take years, and sometimes never arrive at all.

DTB AND A RECURRING PATTERN

For Diamond Trust Bank, the charges represent the latest chapter in a history that has repeatedly featured the word “insider” alongside allegations of fraud and regulatory failure.

In 2018, the bank was rocked by a scandal at its Thika Road Mall branch when a South Korean businesswoman, Lim Sun Pil, alleged that Ksh150 million had been liquidated from two fixed deposit accounts belonging to her and her company, Daehan Pharmaceuticals, without authorisation. The accused in that case included a co-signatory with access to the accounts and the branch manager at the time. DTB denied wrongdoing and said it had not been served with court papers when the case broke, adding that the funds had been withdrawn on the client’s instructions.

But the 2018 scandal itself was not isolated. When newspaper reports about the TRM case emerged, a DTB customer in Kisii county was prompted to check his own fixed deposits and discovered his account had been similarly raided. That disclosure led to the arrest of Peter Sungu Nyakomitta, the DTB Kisii branch manager, who was charged with stealing Sh25 million from customers’ fixed deposit accounts, theft that had been discovered only through an internal reconciliation process. Three DTB branch managers, across three separate branches, had by that point been accused of stealing from customers. The pattern, by any objective reading, pointed to systemic vulnerabilities rather than isolated individual misconduct.

Three DTB branch managers, across three separate branches, had by that point been accused of stealing from customers. The pattern, by any objective reading, pointed to systemic vulnerabilities.

REGULATORY PENALTIES AND TERROR FINANCING LINKS

The bank’s regulatory record adds further layers to its troubled history. In 2018, the Central Bank of Kenya fined Diamond Trust Bank Sh80 million as part of a broader enforcement action against five Kenyan lenders for their role in facilitating suspicious transactions connected to the National Youth Service scandal. The CBK found that DTB, along with KCB, Equity, Standard Chartered and Co-operative Bank, had failed to report large cash transactions to the Financial Reporting Centre, failed to conduct adequate customer due diligence, and allowed customers to transact in cash without appropriate supporting documentation. The DPP at the time, Noordin Haji, warned that prosecution remained on the table even after the fines were paid.

The bank’s compliance failures reached their most alarming expression in 2019. Following the Dusit D2 terrorist attack in Nairobi in January of that year, investigations found that one of the attackers had conducted multiple large cash withdrawals from a DTB branch in Eastleigh in the days preceding the assault. DPP Haji confirmed publicly that Sh50 million had been withdrawn from the branch in the period leading up to the attack, and that none of these transactions had been reported to the Financial Reporting Centre as required by law. He further stated that funds were wired from that account to Jilib, Somalia, which he described as an Al Shabaab headquarters, and to accounts associated with ISIS. DTB Chief Executive Nasim Devji was arrested by the Anti-Terrorism Police Unit in connection with the bank’s failure to detect and report these transactions. She was subsequently released under circumstances that were not fully explained publicly.

DTB has also faced major litigation in Uganda. City tycoon Hamis Kiggundu sued the bank in 2020 alleging that over Ugx 120 billion had been fraudulently debited from his company’s accounts. A Ugandan High Court found in his favour, a judgment that triggered criminal summons against senior DTB officials including Group CEO Nasim Devji, under charges that included computer misuse, making false entries in financial ledgers and conspiracy to commit a crime. The cross-border nature of these cases raised the question of whether governance failures at DTB were systemic across the group.

WHAT THE PATTERN DEMANDS

The Sh149 million case now before Milimani court is being treated, at least publicly, as a case about three individuals. The prosecution will pursue its charges. The defence will test the evidence. The magistrate will weigh the facts.

But the case is also about something larger. It is about whether a bank that has faced repeated, documented instances of insider fraud, regulatory censure for failure to detect suspicious transactions, alleged terror-financing compliance failures, and multi-billion-shilling litigation in two countries has done enough to protect the people who deposit their money with it.

The answers to those questions will not be heard in a magistrate’s courtroom on June 17. They should be demanded of DTB’s board and of the Central Bank of Kenya, which continues to license the institution to take deposits from the Kenyan public.

Rozina Nurdin Patelia did not choose to become the most recent face of what critics say is a structural problem at one of Kenya’s largest banks. She trusted a branch manager, and allegedly that trust was repaid with forgery and theft conducted over five years by the very people whose salaries she and thousands of other customers indirectly helped pay.