- Assistant superintendent of police Peter Maina attached at Safaricom head of money fraud section testified against the two.
- Maina informed the court that the information he received from Kinoti was that Kabugi was demanding the money on behalf of his two co-accused.
Image: FILE
A senior detective from the Director of Criminal Investigations office on Thursday narrated to court how two Safaricom employees allegedly planned to defraud the company a total of Sh300 million.
Milimani chief magistrate Wendy Kagendo heard that Simon Kinuthia and Brian Wamatu demanded from their employer the sum of money not to leak some privileged Safaricom subscriber data from the company database to the public.
Assistant superintendent of police Peter Maina attached at Safaricom head of money fraud section testified against the two.
They are alleged to have committed the offence between May 1 and June 7, 2019.
" The first two accused, who are seated in the dock, had demanded about Sh300 million from Safaricom Kenya Limited, saying failure [to] which they would expose the data to the public,"officer Maina said.
He told the court that they launched investigations into the matter after receiving information from Safaricom's head of ethics compliance Patrick Kinoti that a person by the name Benedict Kabugi Ndung'u sent him a sample of the privileged data.
Kabugi is jointly charged alongside Kinuthia and Wamatu with demanding money by menaces and computer fraud.
Maina informed the court that the information he received from Kinoti was that Kabugi was demanding the money on behalf of his two co-accused.
The officer added that Kinoti, on behalf of Safaricom, in a bid to protect the information from being put to the public, sent Kabugi a sum of Sh50,000.
"Upon receiving the information, we laid a trap and we managed to arrest the said Kabugi at a club in Westlands along Waiyaki Way. It was through intelligence information and with help of the members of the public," the officer said.
The court heard that Kabugi, during the arrest at the said club which he did not mention, was in the company of one Charles Njuguna Kimani.
Maina said that they arrested Kinuthia at the club while unlawfully copying and transferring privileged Safaricom subscriber's data information from the company's regulator database to unauthorised person namely Njuguna.
He further said that, following the arrest of Kabugi and Kinuthia and intensive interrogation at the DCI headquarters, they revealed that they got the secret Safaricom data from two of its employees.
The two however helped the officers to arrest two of the Safaricom staff at a club in Kilimani known as Grill House.
The accused persons' phones, two laptops and hard drive which were recovered from them during the arrest were produced as exhibits in the matter.
The hearing was adjourned to February 16.
(edited by Amol Awuor)