Manhattan Coffee Investment Holding, controlled by Bidco chairman Vimal Shah and former Bank Governor Nahashon Nyagah, has applied to the Mauritius courts to set aside the London court ruling awarding the Tatu City international investors $17 million (Sh1.7 billion).
The London Court of International Arbitration ruled in February that Shah, Nyagah and their associates should pay $17m for damages, interest and costs to SCF Holdings II, a Cypriot holding company controlled by businessman Stephen Jennings. The court found that they had defrauded Tatu City developer Rendeavour, controlled by SCF.
Shah and Nyagah did not challenge the settlement awarded by the London court within the permitted 28 days but still failed to pay. SCF then went to court in Mauritius to enforce the London payment order against MCIH.
Shah told the Financial Times that MCIH was refusing to comply with the award on grounds it “was procured by Jennings’ dishonest evidence” and because of “errors in the way the arbitrator handled the case”.
He did not explain why he had not challenged the arbitration ruling in London, saying he could not “discuss our strategy in public”.
Stephen Jennings, Rendeavour chief executive, told the Financial Times the legal battle with the group’s Kenyan partners had delayed the Tatu City project by three years and illustrated the “significant obstacles to doing business” in Kenya.
The London arbitration case revolved around a $20 million (Sh2 billion) deposit to the sellers of some of the land on which Tatu City is being built, which was never paid despite Nyagah, Shah and their partner Stephen Mwagiru claiming multiple times it had been paid. The London court ruled there had been “false misrepresentation”.
Nyagah did not respond to repeated requests from the FT for comment.
Jennings told the FT he rejected Shah’s allegations that the arbitration ruling was dishonest, saying he participated in two years of arbitration proceedings, agreed to abide by the result and did not challenge it.
Jennings told the FT Kenya’s business environment had “improved dramatically” in recent years, helped by the digitisation of many services, and that the “market share of the clean people is going up gradually”.
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