Radio Africa faults World Cup probe report

By Standard Reporter

Radio Africa has faulted a Government investigation report detailing its alleged role in the Kenya Broadcasting Corporation World Cup 2010 rights scandal.

Radio Africa insists the report "contained extensive inaccuracies and falsifications of the facts".

Through its Managing Director Patrick Quarcoo, the media firm said contrary to the report, Radio Africa is owned by a group of well-regarded Kenyans and not by himself.

He also took issue with his being referred to as Ghanaian, saying he is Kenyan.

The report, exclusively obtained by The Standard On Saturday and published on September 4, was prepared by the Efficiency Monitoring Unit under the Office of the Prime Minister.

In a statement, Quarcoo said Radio Africa had signed an exclusive agreement dated December 22, last year with KBC "for the exploitation of media rights" for which it paid Sh26 million.

Radio Africa goes on to say KBC "deliberately breached the contract and undertook acts contrary to the agreement".

It said KBC and Radio Africa had in fact jointly signed the World Cup Sponsorship and Predict and Win contract with Orange/Telkom Kenya.

In the probe report, investigators had claimed that Radio Africa had defrauded KBC of huge sums of money from the Orange contract. But Radio Africa refutes this and insists it occasioned no such loss to KBC.

VALUE ADDED PARTNERS

Investigators had also indicated that Radio Africa had short-changed the national broadcaster by bringing on board MTech to run value added service, but Radio Africa said both parties agreed on the appointments.

"…KBC had proposed Cellucom and RAL had proposed MTech as its value added partners and… the appointments were jointly agreed by both parties," said Quarcoo.

Radio Africa said it ran all legitimate advertising signed by the partnership.

"In fact, it was KBC that illegally gave away free airtime belonging to Radio Africa stations amounting to millions of shillings to its clients," said the statement.

Radio Africa said it had "legitimately refused to run free advertising" on its networks, as it was "neither consulted by KBC in giving away the free airtime nor, did KBC have the rights to discount and give away free airtime on Radio Africa stations".

It was therefore not true as reported that it had refused to run Sh6.7 million worth of advertising from Del Monte and Sh5 million advertising from Equity, said Quarcoo.