A Businessman, a Billion-Shilling Loan, and a Case That Should Never Have Been
Long before the arrest warrants and the courtroom drama, this story begins in 2016, when businessman Benson Ndeta made a move that would set off nearly a decade of legal warfare. That year, he acquired additional shares in Savannah Cement through his vehicle, Seruji Limited, purchasing them from Wanho International Limited and Acme Wanji Investment Limited. It was a straightforward commercial transaction — the kind that happens every day in boardrooms across Nairobi. But for some of Savannah Cement’s other shareholders, including Donald Kiboro Mwaura and John Gachanga Kaiganaine, it was anything but welcome.
The pushback was immediate. Savannah Heights Limited filed a suit challenging the share acquisition, dragging Ndeta into court over a deal he believed was entirely legitimate. The courts agreed with him. On February 11, 2022, the High Court dismissed the case, effectively affirming his shareholding in Savannah Cement. No appeal was filed. By any reasonable measure, that should have been the end of it. It wasn’t.
A separate dispute had already begun brewing — this one centred on a $35 million loan facility, equivalent to roughly Sh4.5 billion, extended by Absa Bank to Savannah Cement to finance the expansion of its cement plant. Ndeta, acting in his capacity as a director, had been involved in authorising that borrowing. The resolutions enabling the loan were passed. The money moved. The plant was supposed to grow. But within the toxic atmosphere of the shareholder dispute, the loan became a weapon.
The Charges That Didn’t Add Up
In November 2024, Ndeta found himself standing before the Milimani Law Courts facing three criminal charges: obtaining credit by false pretence, making a document without authority, and forgery. The prosecution’s case was that he had purported to act on behalf of Savannah Cement, fraudulently obtained the $35 million from Absa Bank, and forged the minutes of a company board meeting to do it. On paper, it sounded serious. In practice, there was a fundamental problem — a commercial court had already examined the very same resolutions and found them to be valid.
Ndeta saw the criminal case for what he believed it was: not justice, but a continuation of the shareholder war by other means. He challenged the prosecution before the High Court, arguing that the criminal proceedings were unlawful, that they selectively targeted him while leaving other individuals involved in the same borrowing process entirely untouched, and that the entire exercise was designed to weaponise the criminal justice system against him in what was fundamentally a commercial dispute between shareholders. His argument was pointed and difficult to dismiss — if the resolutions were valid, what exactly had he forged?
He went further. At the time of his arrest, Ndeta was in the middle of pursuing a major investment in Bamburi Cement Limited, one of Kenya’s most significant cement producers. He alleged that his arrest and the looming prosecution were deliberately orchestrated to force him to abandon that business bid — that someone, somewhere, stood to gain from his legal entanglement, and that the DCI and DPP had been enlisted, wittingly or otherwise, to deliver that outcome.
When New Evidence Changes Everything
The High Court initially dismissed his petition on December 5, 2025, a blow that might have ended the fight for a lesser opponent. But Ndeta returned with ammunition. He presented the commercial court’s judgment as new and critical evidence — a finding that the borrowing resolutions authorising Savannah Cement to take the Absa loan were entirely valid — and applied for a review of the dismissed petition. On May 28, 2026, the court allowed that review application, set aside its earlier judgment, and ordered a fresh hearing. The door had reopened.
In the fresh proceedings, Ndeta also leaned on evidence filed by Absa Bank itself in April 2023, confirming that the loan had been legally offered and accepted and that Savannah Cement’s security documents had been properly executed. This wasn’t a rogue borrowing. The bank, the borrower, and the legal paperwork all lined up. The DCI and DPP pushed back hard, insisting that their investigation and the decision to prosecute fell squarely within their constitutional and statutory mandates. The DPP accused Ndeta of attempting to obstruct the prosecution from exercising its lawful function. John Gachanga Kaiganaine, one of the opposing shareholders, argued that the commercial court’s findings related to a KCB Bank loan, not the Absa facility, and accused Ndeta of misrepresenting those findings to kill the criminal case.
The High Court was not persuaded by any of it. The court found that the commercial court had conclusively determined that the resolutions authorising Savannah Cement to borrow from Absa were valid. From that finding, the logic of the criminal charges collapsed entirely. “If the borrowing resolutions were valid,” the court held, “it is difficult to see how the Petitioner can be criminally liable for obtaining credit by pretence or for forging minutes that were, according to a competent court of concurrent jurisdiction, valid.” That sentence alone dismantles the prosecution’s entire premise.
Selective Justice Is Not Justice
The court did not stop at the logical inconsistency. It went further and found that Ndeta had been singled out for prosecution despite other individuals who were equally involved in the borrowing process facing no charges whatsoever. “This selective prosecution, in the Court’s view, constitutes a violation of the Petitioner’s right to equality before the law,” the judgment stated. In a country where young Kenyans are constantly told that the law applies equally to everyone, that finding should land like a stone in still water — because it confirms what many already suspect: that prosecution in Kenya can be a precision instrument, pointed at specific people for specific reasons that have nothing to do with guilt.
The court further found that the Director of Public Prosecutions had abused his prosecutorial discretion by charging Ndeta on the basis of allegations that had already been undermined by the commercial court’s findings. The decision to prosecute, the court concluded, was driven by extraneous considerations and failed to account for the need to prevent abuse of the legal process. Those are damning words about an institution that is supposed to be the last line of defence between citizens and the misuse of state power. The prosecution was declared unlawful, null and void from the outset — not just dismissed, but erased.
What this case reveals is not merely a story about one businessman’s legal victory. It is a case study in how commercial disputes among powerful shareholders can metastasise into criminal proceedings, how the DCI and DPP can be drawn into — or choose to enter — battles that are fundamentally about money and corporate control rather than public interest, and how the courts, when they function as they should, can call that out by name. Ndeta walked away. But the deeper question — about who else is sitting in a cell or fighting charges because someone with enough influence decided to make a phone call — remains very much open.
