The missing billions: Unraveling the mystery of Kenya's 2014 Eurobond scandal

In 2014, with a lot of fanfare, President Uhuru Kenyatta announced from State House the ‘brilliant’ plan that the government was going to borrow US$2 billion in a so-called Eurobond loan, to be paid back at some time in the distant future.

But the utilisation and conservation of that money went all ‘wrong’ from the get-go.

To start with, the first part of the proceeds to arrive, US$605 million, was not put into the government’s ‘bank account’, the Consolidated Fund

Then, from the Central Bank, this money was used to pay off an old debt, without the approval of the controller of budget as per the Constitution.

When faced with the fait accompli, the controller first truthfully said she hadn’t approved the repayment and then – doubtless after being taken aside for a ‘little chat’ – said she had.

In truth, the only people who had taken it upon themselves to approve the repayment of that loan were a few senior people in government. We don’t know what the loan was for.

Next, a second tranche of the $2 billion, US$395 million, was transferred from the US to Kenya.

This and the mysterious earlier loan repayment figure added up to exactly US$1 billion. It was all that would ever arrive in Kenya. The remaining $1 billion of the $2 billion Eurobond has never been accounted for.

Endless stories, bogus letters (purportedly effecting transfer of the money from the CBK to the government) and vehement protestations have over the years been offered by the Treasury and the CBK, backed up by a lot of ignorant pronouncements from sycophantic know-nothings.

To put the tin lid on it, the officials whose job it was to protect the public’s interests laughably preferred to keep summoning the then opposition leader, Raila Odinga, who was busy trying to expose the scam, to tell them what he had figured out about the matter.

Countless tables with lots of columns in tiny print and unfathomable arithmetic were published. None of them provided any proof whatsoever of what had happened to that second $1 billion.

Not a single genuine document has ever been published to provide a paper trail of where it went.

All we have ever been offered is a litany of ever more unlikely tales, as various officials have scrabbled around looking for some kind of halfway-credible explanation of an event that cannot be explained, for one simple reason: the transfer never happened.

The two transfers that did occur, amounting to that total US$1 billion, remain the only amounts from the Eurobond proceeds that were ever traced into the Consolidated Fund by the auditor-general and the controller of budget, and the only amounts for which supporting documents have ever been published by the Treasury.

Head of the Treasury at the time was Henry K Rotich, who years later was tried for corruptly flouting procurement procedures in awarding, in 2017 under the Uhuru-William Ruto government, an Italian firm with a contract worth more than US$450m for the construction of two dams. These were the infamous Arror and Kimwarrer dams, which cost this country Sh63 billion and have never been built. That money also disappeared.

Rotich and his co-conspirators were acquitted in 2023, under Ruto’s government, with the court observing that the prosecution’s approach had been designed for failure, with reckless dereliction of duty. The Office of the Deputy Public Prosecutor was part of a political conspiracy to defeat justice.

Whatever happened to the Eurobond money was also decided among a small group of conspirators in Uhuru and Ruto’s government.

That money is somewhere– somewhere it is not supposed to be, in a place that is top secret, a location known to only a few. And there it remains.

The prospect of a new government finally unearthing the truth must be chilling the perpetrators to the bone.