For close to a decade, former Lugari MP Cyrus Jirongo has been a near permanent fixture in Kenya’s courtrooms, as business dealings from his days as a powerful government bureaucrat keep resurrecting legal questions that require a judge’s determination.
From civil and commercial matters to criminal cases, Mr Jirongo has had to either appear in person or instruct lawyers to represent him in court.
Some of his more recent court appearances are intertwined, as they relate to his dealings with a collapsed bank, Postbank Credit Ltd, and a 1,000-acre piece of land in Ruai valued at about Sh10 billion.
Mr Jirongo’s latest, and probably most crucial, legal challenge involves the Ruai property, which government agencies repossessed last year after asserting that it was grabbed from the Nairobi Water and Sewerage Company (NWSC).
NWSC officers seized the land with the help of dozens of police officers in early May 2020 and insisted it was set aside for the expansion of the agency’s water treatment plant that sits on an adjacent plot.
Mr Jirongo has for at least seven years fought several court battles to take ownership of the prime property, which he has in the past admitted is his ticket out of a financial quagmire.
In 2014, Mr Jirongo filed two cases against the Kenya Deposit Insurance Corporation (KDIC), which wanted to auction the land to recover a Sh20 billion debt it claimed he owed collapsed Postbank Credit.
In the first case, Mr Jirongo challenged the legality of the auction attempt, and in the second he questioned the amounts claimed by KDIC.
Mr Jirongo had in the early 1990s borrowed Sh1 billion from the bank, and KDIC insisted that the debt had grown to Sh20 billion.
At the time Mr Jirongo borrowed the money, Kenya had not yet implemented the in duplum rule, which bars interest on loans from exceeding the amount lent out.
Won first round of the fightMr Jirongo, a presidential candidate in the 2017 General Election, revealed in the 2014 cases that he intended to sell the land and use some of the proceeds to pay a Sh30 million debt he owed a company identified as Emris Investments.Emris sued Mr Jirongo in 2013 for breach of contract. After promising to sell a house in Imara Daima estate to Emris, Mr Jirongo offloaded the property to someone else.The company sued Mr Jirongo for Sh50 million after he failed to honour a commitment to pay up.Since 2014, Mr Jirongo […]