John Ngumi, alongside four partners, birthed the Loita Capital Partners Group in 1994. [David Njaaga, Standard] John Ngumi, who is credited with brokering deals worth more than Sh1 trillion, survived by eating what he caught in Kenya’s financial jungle.
Those were heady times; mega deals were rolling in, with history placing the current Industrial and Commercial Development Corporation (ICDC) chairman in the thick of things just when Kenya’s capital markets were being carved out.
But away from the glamour of clinching multi-million-shilling deals locally and in some of the world’s leading financial capitals, the first-rate investment banker ironically found himself in unfamiliar territory, racking up debts running into tens of millions of shillings.
The debts would end up making his home the target of auctioneers, who gleefully advertised it in the back pages of two of the leading dailies. READ MORE
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It was a baffling paradox; on the one hand, he had made a name for himself facilitating multi-billion-shilling deals, boasting some of Africa’s blue-chip firms and governments as his clients, but on the other, personal finance demons tormented him.
“I spent between 1997 and 2000 desperately trying to keep my financial head above water,” he recounted to Financial Standard.
In a revealing interview, Ngumi retraces his 37-year journey to the top, from his student days at the prestigious University of Oxford in the UK to his role in shaping Kenya’s financial markets and his fizzing ambition to win that nearly felled him but later rescued him out of his financial rut.
In 1994, Ngumi alongside four partners birthed the Loita Capital Partners Group that consisted of Loita Asset Management (LAM) and Loita Capital Partners Ltd, looking to create the first indigenous investment bank. John Ngumi. [Collins Oduor, Standard] And they did. Between 1994 and 1997, LAM emerged as a big force in Kenya’s capital markets. It helped place the first-ever bond at the Nairobi Securities Exchange (NSE) and exclusively worked with the Central Bank of Kenya (CBK) in structuring a Treasury bond programme.
However, the intoxicating world of investment banking – fast and marked by high risk – didn’t spare Ngumi and his partners; it ended up burning their fingers, badly.
“It’s just that we were incredibly ambitious and our costs would never match our revenues. We were spending like mad, like classic London investment bankers,” said Ngumi of the […]
