The calculated entrapment of a journalist in 2020, the High Court judgment that exposed state machinery being weaponized on behalf of a bank, and the 2023 Banking Fraud Unit investigation that erupted with national force only to die in silence. This is the architecture of impunity and the questions that still demand answers.
When Cyprian Nyakundi began publishing a series of explosive blog posts in late 2019, he detailed what he described as systemic money laundering, questionable client networks with alleged arms and narcotics links, and regulatory irregularities at Victoria Commercial Bank. The institution did not respond with transparency or regulatory engagement. It responded with elite London lawyers, court injunctions, and when those proved insufficient, a covert operation that would see the blogger lured into a trap, arrested in front of rolling cameras, and publicly branded an extortionist.
The allegations were serious. Nyakundi claimed the bank, under CEO Dr. Yogesh Pattni and chairman Kanji D. Pattni, had become a conduit for illicit flows. He said it operated a shadowy parallel structure. He alleged that Pattni himself held undisclosed foreign citizenship. The bank, through Pattni, dismissed the posts as completely false, treacherous and libelous. It hired the high-powered British firm Schillings and secured a High Court injunction on September 24, 2019, ordering the posts taken down. Nyakundi defied it and kept writing.
What followed was not a conventional legal battle. It was something darker.
Court records in Constitutional Petition E284 of 2020 tell a damning story. In January 2020, businessman Dharmesh Shah, acting according to the record on Pattni’s instructions, reached out to Nuri “Tinta” Akasha. Court documents describe Akasha as a relative of the Akasha brothers, Ibrahim and Baktash, who were convicted in the United States in 2019 for large-scale heroin and methamphetamine trafficking. Akasha’s task was to make contact with Nyakundi.
Crucially, before any formal complaint had even been lodged with police, Akasha contacted DCI Corporal Charles Odhiambo, badge 85552. This was the same officer who had earlier investigated a separate complaint against the blogger. Odhiambo advised Akasha on the way to go about the whole issue and suggested getting Nyakundi to a meeting with bank representatives. Odhiambo then used a personal contact at the Standard Group, journalist Nicholas Asego, to help lure Nyakundi. The DCI’s own words, captured in the court record, were that they had planned a discreet operation and did not want to be seen to be involved.
On January 12, 2020, Nyakundi met Akasha, Shah and another individual. Shah, presenting himself as acting for Victoria Commercial Bank, asked Nyakundi his price to pull the posts and stop publishing. The figure started at Ksh30 million and settled at Ksh17.5 million. Subsequent meetings were held in a boardroom secretly fitted with DCI surveillance cameras. On January 20, 2020, Nyakundi and his associate Emmanuel Nyamweya, also referred to as Ong’era, arrived at Westgate Mall in Westlands. They were handed a small black shopping bag containing Ksh1 million as a down payment. Dr. Yogesh Pattni himself was involved in the handover sequence. Moments later, hidden DCI officers moved in. The arrest was immediate, theatrical, and splashed across every news bulletin. The extortionist blogger had been caught red-handed trying to shake down a respectable banker.
The narrative was locked in. The allegations of money laundering and regulatory rot at Victoria Commercial Bank were instantly reframed as the grievances of a criminal. The banker was the victim. The journalist was the fraud.
For more than a year the extortion case, Criminal Case No. 144 of 2020, crawled through the Milimani Chief Magistrates Court. Then, on March 11, 2021, Justice Anthony C. Mrima delivered a judgment that laid bare the operation for what it was. Applying the timing, nature and extent of involvement test, Justice Mrima found that the DCI had been at the centre of the matter from inception, long before any formal complaint existed. Corporal Odhiambo had advised Akasha, facilitated introductions, obtained Nyakundi’s contact details, and ensured the meetings were recorded. Secret cameras had been installed by investigators. The entire encounter had been choreographed.
The judge’s conclusion was unequivocal. In essence, had it not been Corporal Odhiambo advising, linking up Nuri with the Petitioners and being firmly behind the whole encounter, there is no evidence that the Petitioners would have nevertheless taken any steps to commit the offence. The whole ordeal was masterminded by the DCI. All evidence obtained through the entrapment was ruled inadmissible under Article 50(4) of the Constitution. The constitutional petition was upheld. The DPP later terminated the criminal case. Nyakundi and his co-accused walked free unconditionally in August 2021.
The fallout that did not happen is as revealing as the judgment itself. Corporal Odhiambo faced no public disciplinary action. No independent investigation into the DCI’s role was announced. Victoria Commercial Bank and its CEO faced no institutional consequences for their apparent role in initiating the sequence. The Schillings defamation proceedings quietly dissolved. And most critically, the original allegations of money laundering, arms and drug network links, parallel banking, and regulatory irregularities at VCB were never subjected to any serious, independent public examination by the Central Bank of Kenya or any other competent authority. They had been successfully attached to the persona of a criminal. When that persona was legally exonerated, the allegations were allowed to die with it in the public mind. That outcome was not accidental. It was the first successful deployment of a method.
By mid-2023 the same category of questions had acquired concrete form inside the DCI’s own Banking Fraud Investigations Unit. Mumias Sugar Company, once the economic backbone of western Kenya, had collapsed into receivership. Into the insolvency proceedings stepped Vartox Resources Inc., a British Virgin Islands-registered, Dubai-linked entity, claiming a Ksh6 billion debt allegedly inherited from Victoria Commercial Bank’s acquisition of distressed facilities originally held by Proparco and Ecobank. The mechanism by which a small Kenyan bank moved tens of millions of dollars in foreign development debt into an offshore vehicle, and the source of the funds, became the subject of sworn court affidavits by Inspector Isaac Ogutu.
The DCI obtained court orders to investigate VCB accounts. Pattni was questioned. Sugar baron Jaswant Rai, alleged in multiple reports to have held controlling influence in VCB through proxies in violation of beneficial ownership rules, was intercepted at JKIA. Then, on August 25, 2023, Rai was abducted in broad daylight along Wood Avenue in Kilimani by armed men posing as police. He was held for two days and released unharmed. No ransom. No arrests. Hours after Rai’s release, on August 28, 2023, Banking Fraud Unit officers arrested Dr. Yogesh Pattni at the Two Rivers Mall offices of Victoria Commercial Bank, despite an active conservatory order from the Commercial Court purporting to restrain aspects of the investigation. President William Ruto had, the previous day in Kakamega, issued his now-infamous ultimatum to sugar cartel operators: withdraw your cases, leave the country, face jail, or go to heaven. Within 48 hours of Pattni’s arrest, Vartox Resources Inc. filed a notice withdrawing its Court of Appeal challenge to the Sarrai Group’s lease of Mumias Sugar. The pressure appeared to have worked. The system appeared to have finally moved. And then, once again, silence.
As of June 2026, nearly three years after the dramatic arrest, no criminal charges have been publicly confirmed against Dr. Yogesh Pattni or Victoria Commercial Bank in connection with the Mumias-Vartox probe. The DPP has offered no public explanation. The Central Bank of Kenya has maintained complete institutional silence on how it supervised a bank that acquired rights over assets worth tens of millions of dollars in a collapsed national strategic enterprise, or on persistent allegations of proxy ownership. The Kenya Revenue Authority has not publicly acted on the 2025 finding by Justice Alfred Mabeya in Kisumu that a property transaction involving Pattni, his wife Azmina, and Victoria Commercial Bank, structured through the shell company Flynn Limited, was designed to appear as a corporate reorganisation but was in substance a sale and purchase transaction meant to evade taxes.
The parallel is impossible to ignore. In 2020, when an external critic published allegations, the response was to mobilize state investigative capacity through intermediaries with troubling associations to entrap and discredit him. In 2023, when the DCI’s own specialized unit developed grounds serious enough to arrest the same individual despite a court order, those grounds appear to have been quietly neutralized without explanation. The beneficiary in both instances is the same: the man who remains chief executive of Victoria Commercial Bank, operating from discreet premises, serving a select clientele, with an undiminished appetite for aggressive legal combat whenever threatened.
The human cost is not theoretical. The farmers of western Kenya who depended on Mumias Sugar for generations did not merely lose a mill. They lost the economic infrastructure of entire sub-regions while opaque litigation, fuelled in part by the Vartox-VCB debt maneuvers, consumed years that should have been spent on revival. The criminal investigation meant to determine whether those maneuvers were legitimate has been allowed to sleep.
This publication places the following on record. To the Director of the DCI: Was the Banking Fraud Unit file on Pattni, VCB and Vartox transmitted complete to the DPP? If not, why not? Has the Director personally reviewed the integrity of an investigation chain that includes a documented precedent of DCI officers being found by a High Court judge to have engaged in entrapment at the behest of the same institution? To the Director of Public Prosecutions: Was a prosecutable file received? On what specific evidential grounds, if any, was it deemed insufficient? The public interest here is documented and substantial. To the Central Bank of Kenya: How did your supervisory processes account for multi-year, multi-source allegations of beneficial ownership violations and the acquisition of distressed assets worth tens of millions of dollars by a bank of VCB’s scale? What was the outcome of any parallel inquiry? To the Kenya Revenue Authority: What action has been taken following Justice Mabeya’s judicial characterisation of a Pattni-linked transaction as structured to evade taxes? To Parliament’s Finance and Justice Committees: The pattern exposed by both the 2020 entrapment and the apparent stalling of the 2023 probe demands formal, on-the-record scrutiny. Accounting officers from the DCI, DPP, CBK and KRA should be summoned and placed under oath.
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