Conrad Law Advocates LLP, the Nairobi law firm already under scrutiny after its Ecobank Kenya account was used to receive the proceeds of a Sh60.8 million fake ambulance tender fraud targeting a Swedish investor, has now emerged as the financial conduit in a second major international scam, this one a USD 600,000 fake gold deal that ensnared an Australian national and stretched across three countries.
The Directorate of Criminal Investigations confirmed the second case following the arrest of Duncan Okaka Okonji on March 24, 2026, and his arraignment at the Milimani Law Courts the following day. Okonji, charged with conspiracy to defraud contrary to Section 317 of the Penal Code, denied the charge and was released on a bond of Ksh5 million or cash bail of Ksh1 million with two contact persons. The case is set for mention on April 7, 2026.
The DCI’s disclosure that the Australian victim transferred USD 600,000 through Conrad Law Advocates before reporting the fraud means the firm’s account has now been identified as the designated recipient of stolen funds in at least two separate international cons within the space of three months, a pattern that investigators and legal observers say is impossible to explain away as coincidence.
The Directorate of Criminal Investigations confirmed on March 20, 2026, that USD 470,750, the equivalent of approximately Sh60.8 million, stolen from a Swedish timber and machinery exporter had already been channelled directly into an Ecobank Kenya account held in the name of Conrad Law Advocates LLP, a Nairobi-based law firm whose managing partner is one Conrad Maloba.
The DCI statement, issued over the signature of John Marete for the Director of Criminal Investigations, said investigators arrested seven suspects on March 10 inside a 12th-floor boardroom at Harambee House after a fraud scheme that had been running since January 10, 2026. A lawyer believed to have facilitated the receipt of funds remained at large at the time of the statement and was actively being sought.
That lawyer, DCI says, is connected to Conrad Law Advocates LLP, which received the stolen funds across a series of wire transfers from a sister company of the victim, Lianyungang Chanta International Wood Co. Ltd, registered in China. The money did not originate in Kenya and it did not, investigators say, come from any legitimate transaction.
The Anatomy of the Con
The fraud began with an unsolicited WhatsApp message. On January 10, 2026, Talal Yousef Yousef Zaitoun, who runs Stockholm-based Jokara AB, a company that exports timber and machinery to African markets, received a message from a man calling himself Stanley Ndawula, using a Ugandan telephone number, requesting a product catalogue.
Within days, a second contact emerged, this time from a Kenyan number. Geoffrey Were Odondi introduced himself as a consultant at a firm called Interlog Corporate, posing as a facilitator between the Government of Kenya and private foreign suppliers. Were told Zaitoun that Kenya was procuring 500 Toyota Hiace High Roof ambulances and that Jokara AB had been identified as a suitable supplier.
Zaitoun flew to Nairobi on January 26 on a Turkish Airlines flight, was collected from Jomo Kenyatta International Airport by Were and a driver named Nicho, and was taken to the Radisson Blu Hotel Arboretum. The following day he was escorted into Harambee House, the gazetted seat of the Kenyan presidency, where a group of men presented themselves as senior officials from the National Treasury and the Ministry of Health.
He was shown documents confirming a contract worth USD 36,025,000 for the supply of the ambulances and told that to proceed he would need to pay either a performance bond or insurance coverage equivalent to three percent of the contract value, amounting to USD 1,080,750. He was also offered two pre-qualification packages: USD 90,000 for a single government contract over five years, or USD 110,000 for multiple contracts within the same period.
He chose the higher package. On January 30, USD 110,000 was wired from his Chinese sister company to the Conrad Law Advocates LLP account at Ecobank Kenya. The invoice, company search records, and a certificate of incorporation that accompanied the transaction all purported to belong to the law firm. The pre-qualification certificate itself, however, carried an award date of October 22, 2025, months before any tender discussions had begun. The suspects, when pressed, smoothly explained that government certificates were routinely backdated.
Even after Zaitoun returned to Sweden, the pressure did not relent. On February 11, a further USD 360,750 was transferred to the same Conrad Law account under the pretext of insurance, pushing the total defrauded amount to USD 470,750. Investigators say the syndicate continued pressing for an additional USD 1,080,000 in installments, which is what brought Zaitoun back to Nairobi on March 9 with his brother Hatem. The morning of March 10, at the meeting where the next tranche was to be negotiated, DCI detectives moved in.
The Role of a Law Firm’s Account
The use of an advocate’s client account to receive the proceeds of a fraud is not merely a procedural detail. Under Kenya’s Anti-Money Laundering framework, legal practitioners handling client funds are subject to enhanced due diligence obligations, including obligations to verify the source of funds, to report suspicious transactions, and to maintain proper records.
The selection of Conrad Law Advocates LLP’s Ecobank Kenya account as the repository for the stolen funds would, if the firm’s involvement is proven, expose it to serious criminal liability under the Proceeds of Crime and Anti-Money Laundering Act, as well as potential disciplinary proceedings before the Law Society of Kenya.
DCI’s March 20 statement was explicit that the lawyer linked to the account had not been arrested and remained at large. Investigators say the full financial trail, including where the USD 470,750 went after it landed at Ecobank, has not yet been mapped. The statement warned that several individuals, whether government officials or otherwise, may yet face arrest.
The Second Con: A Phantom Gold Consignment and a Dubai Honeytrap
The gold scheme was constructed with the kind of elaborate staging that specialists in transnational fraud describe as a multi-jurisdictional confidence operation. According to DCI investigators, the complaint dates to October 2025, when the Australian victim, while in Dubai, was introduced to a man presenting himself as Marshall Morrison, an American investor.
Morrison, whose identity has not been independently verified and who remains at large, reportedly introduced the Australian to Okonji, who presented himself as a facilitator for the transfer of a 590-kilogram gold consignment. The victim was subsequently flown to Tanzania, where the suspects staged visits to purported artisanal mining sites to reinforce the illusion of a legitimate gold export transaction. He was then brought to Kenya, where a series of meetings were held and documentation was prepared to convince him that arrangements were actively underway to ship the consignment to Dubai.
Believing the transaction to be genuine, the Australian transferred USD 600,000 through Conrad Law Advocates LLP before independent inquiries hardened into suspicion and he reported the matter to the DCI. The criminal architecture of the gold scheme closely mirrors the ambulance tender fraud: a foreign national is targeted abroad, brought into Kenya through orchestrated hospitality, shown fabricated documentary evidence, and directed to wire money through the same Nairobi law firm.
That the same firm’s account appears in two separate transnational fraud operations within months of each other, one targeting a Swede and one targeting an Australian, has drawn immediate scrutiny to the question of whether Conrad Law Advocates was an unwitting instrument or a knowing facilitator. The DCI has not publicly stated which position it is investigating, but the arrest of Okonji and the identification of the firm’s account in both prosecutorial disclosures signals that the money trail is being followed upward.
Conrad Law and Ecobank: A History of Controversy
The ambulance tender fraud is not the first time Conrad Law Advocates LLP has found itself entangled in a high-stakes dispute centred on money held at Ecobank Kenya. Court records reviewed by The Star reveal that the firm has previously appeared in contentious financial litigation involving hundreds of millions of shillings, the Assets Recovery Agency, and allegations of money flowing through the very same bank.
In 2022, the ARA froze Sh2.5 billion held in Ecobank Kenya accounts belonging to a Singapore-registered digital payments company called Kiwipay Kenya Limited, citing suspicions of money laundering and overseas credit and debit card fraud. When the ARA’s forfeiture application was eventually withdrawn in October 2022 and the accounts unfrozen, what followed was a spectacularly destructive dispute among the company’s directors and the law firms that had represented them.
Conrad Law Advocates LLP, whose managing partner Conrad Maloba swore key affidavits in the subsequent litigation, was among the firms that had been retained to provide legal services to Kiwipay during the ARA investigations. Court records show the firm claimed it had been engaged in May 2022 and had rendered services including preparation of legal opinions, engagement with the ARA, and applications for partial access to the frozen accounts. The firm subsequently claimed USD 527,094.68 in legal fees, of which it said it had only been paid USD 40,000.
When Conrad Law Advocates filed suit in January 2023 before the Milimani Commercial Court in Commercial Case E005 of 2023 seeking to attach Kiwipay’s Ecobank accounts as a lien for the alleged unpaid fees, both Kiwipay and Ecobank Kenya opposed the application vigorously. The court ultimately dismissed the firm’s applications in a ruling issued on September 16, 2024, with Justice J.W.W. Mong’are finding that there was no signed written agreement between the parties to support the firm’s claimed fee of USD 527,094.68. The invoice, the judge found, was a unilateral document that had never been countersigned by Kiwipay and therefore did not constitute an enforceable contract.
The Kiwipay litigation was itself a vortex of competing claims. A Laotian national named Monthida Rashi, who described herself as a director and shareholder of Kiwipay Kenya, filed a separate suit alleging that following the unfreezing of the accounts, Ecobank had authorised transactions that drained more than Sh2.8 billion from accounts associated with her company without her knowledge or consent. She alleged in court papers that up to Sh500 million of those funds had been paid out to six Kenyan law firms as fees in disputes she said had been engineered without her instructions.
The firm’s name appeared in that context alongside several other advocates who, the foreign investor alleged, were serving interests adverse to Kiwipay’s legitimate ownership. The suit called for all transactions sanctioned through those law firms to be suspended pending investigation. That application was placed before presiding judge Alfred Mabeya for directions.
The Kiwipay affair had a further dimension that drew public attention. Court papers filed by I&M Bank disclosed that former Kiambu Governor William Kabogo had been identified as the principal beneficiary of a Sh340 million transfer from Kiwipay’s accounts at Ecobank, routed through the firm of Rene and Hans Advocates LLP to I&M Bank in March 2023. Former Nairobi Governor Mike Sonko was reported to have personally visited I&M Bank demanding information about the money trail. Neither man was charged in connection with the transactions.
A Firm, A Pattern, and a Question of Accountability
What the ambulance tender fraud and the gold consignment scheme now expose in combination is not merely a structural vulnerability in Kenya’s anti-money laundering architecture, but the brazen repeated use of one law firm’s account as the designated exit point for international fraud proceeds. The total sum funnelled through Conrad Law Advocates LLP across the two known cases now stands at USD 1,070,750, the equivalent of approximately Sh138 million, all of it wired by foreign nationals who believed they were entering into legitimate transactions.
The DCI statement on the ambulance case noted that no legitimate government tender requires payments to private law firms or personal accounts. The DCI disclosure on the gold case reinforces the same principle: no legitimate commodity transaction requires wire transfers to an advocate’s account as a first step. In both cases, the targeting of sophisticated foreign investors, one European and one Australian, through the same Nairobi law firm suggests a degree of institutional confidence in the arrangement that investigators say they are actively probing.
Seven suspects in the ambulance case were arraigned before the Milimani Law Courts on March 16 on charges including conspiracy to defraud, obtaining money by false pretences, forgery, and multiple counts under the Proceeds of Crime and Anti-Money Laundering Act. All seven pleaded not guilty and were released on bond of Ksh5 million each. Their passports were surrendered to court. The matter is set for pre-trial mention on April 1, 2026. Duncan Okaka Okonji, charged in the gold case, is next before court on April 7.
The lawyer connected to the Conrad Law account in the ambulance case had still not been arrested at the time of publication. Marshall Morrison, identified in the gold scheme as the Dubai contact who made the initial introduction, also remains at large. DCI says more arrests are coming in both matters and that the agency is pursuing all available legal avenues to trace and recover the stolen funds.
Whether that pursuit will extend to the Law Society of Kenya, which has oversight over advocates and their client accounts, is a question that the dual fraud disclosures have now placed squarely before the professional body. The Law Society has not issued any public statement regarding Conrad Law Advocates LLP.
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