When, in August of 1990, Scotland Yard’s Detective Superintendent John Troon, published his ‘Final Report’ on the investigation into the murder of Minister of Foreign Affairs, Dr Robert Ouko, he had no firm suspects. Instead, his report could only call for ‘further investigations’.
The conclusions to Troon’s final report included six recommendations on how this further investigation might be conducted. The first of these recommendations called for “full and impartial investigation into the allegations made by the BAK directors against some senior government personnel”.
The ‘Kisumu molasses corruption report’ theory and where it comes from
This allegation neatly outlines what came to be known as the ‘Kisumu molasses corruption report theory’. This theory postulated that Robert Ouko was killed because he was preparing a report on corruption in the upper reaches of Kenya’s government. More specifically, this was in regard to a contracts-for-‘kick backs’ graft scandal hidden within the tender process for the proposed rehabilitation of the Kisumu molasses production plant.
Despite the allegation, Troon never found any record of such a report. None of the people he interviewed as part of the investigation ever even admitted to having seen it. In fact, only one person, ‘BAK director’ Marianne Briner-Mattern, ever mentions its existence. Despite this, Troon considered the Kisumu molasses corruption report worthy of greater scrutiny.
When Troon mentions the BAK directors, it is Briner-Mattern and Domenico Airaghi that he is talking of. As the self-proclaimed directors of the BAK Group, it was Airaghi and Briner-Mattern’s company that had initially won the tender for the Kisumu molasses plant revamp in 1987. They had lost the contract – the Minister of Industry at the time, Dalmas Otieno, had ended the contract with ‘BAK Group’ after it was found that they hadn’t done the promised feasibility study, nor sourced any funds for the proposed construction – many months before Ouko was murdered.
Troon considered the testimony of Briner-Mattern and Airaghi with a high degree of confidence, believing them to be running “a reputable company” and assessing them to be “truthful and honest” individuals.
Despite their failure to meet the terms of their contract, Briner-Mattern and Airaghi successfully presented themselves to Troon as representatives of a cheated foreign company. Their accusations of a corruption report and their claims, levelled on the Kenyan government, for compensation no doubt backed up this impression.
The so-called ‘BAK Directors’ were not cheated innocents, however. They were fraudsters and one of them even had the rap sheet to prove it.
Sinatra and scandal: Briner-Mattern and Airaghi, the BAK directors with secrets to spill
All the while the ‘BAK Group’ had been tendering for the molasses plant rehabilitation contract, Airaghi was on bail from an Italian court. In 1987, mere months before Kenya’s Cabinet ratified the ‘BAK Group’/molasses plant project deal, he had been convicted for extortion by a court in Milan. At his conviction, the judge said of Airaghi that he had “the attributes of an international fortune hunter.”
Briner-Mattern had been a witness in Airaghi’s case but the judge said of her time on the stand that it was best to draw a “compassionate veil” over her testimony. With almost theatrical irony, considering how much authority her testimony would be given in the Ouko murder investigation that came five years later, the judge even commented on her “unreliability” as a witness.
Though it managed to escape Troon’s team at the time of the Ouko murder investigation, stories of this scandalous nature were already intimately enmeshed with the names Airaghi and Briner-Mattern. They had been ever since Airaghi allowed himself to be interviewed by Italian magazine Europeao while he was again on trial for fraud.
In that interview, he said this of himself: “I dedicate my efforts to whatever activity can make me money” (‘The Voice of a Godfather’, in Europeao, December 5, 1987). He then went on to describe his role in facilitating the illegal purchase of weapons for Pretoria’s police force; South Africa was, at the time, subject to an international arms embargo.
After that, unpressured, he volunteered information on his role in an alleged money laundering scheme enacted on behalf of non-other than one of the most popular singers and entertainers of the 20th century, Frank Sinatra, as well as the Italian Hollywood film star (Three coins in the fountain and The Italian Job) Rossano Brazzi.
Airaghi went to make unbelievable allegations that he had handled billions of dollars of Sinatra’s money through Brazzi, buying arms, money-laundering and “who knows what else”.
By now ‘irony’ starts to feel as if it isn’t the right word for the parallels the past has with the Ouko murder investigation. With money on the table, the Europeao article proves that Airaghi was entirely capable of spreading scandalous stories in order to leverage pressure on whomever might be coerced into releasing it.
In fact, this stratagem from the Airaghi/Briner-Mattern playbook sees a re-emergence after Troon’s Ouko murder investigation. With their compensation claims still unmet, Briner-Mattern, now speaking to the 2005 Parliamentary Select Committee on the Ouko murder, intimated that she was ready to share the whole truth, including what she knew about President Daniel arap Moi’s proclivity for Ugandan prostitutes.
“What convinced Moi most to stop Dr Ouko”, she said, suggesting in this context that then President was Ouko’s killer, “was the information that Dr Ouko had inquired about Moi’s private life and here mainly about the Ugandan girls.”
In that same committee interview, Briner-Mattern also alleged that she’d been in a “relationship” with Moi since 1980/81. She also claimed that she’d ended her once great friend Raila Odinga’s 2002 presidential bid “with just one phone call” (Briner-Mattern witness testimony, PSC Inquiry 2003-5). It is obvious now, looking back and with all the evidence in front of us, that this convicted blackmailer and his accomplice were willing to create any story, no matter how salacious, in order to extort money out of others.
‘BAK Group’: the “reputable company”
Despite their principle role in Troon’s investigation, neither of the pair were resident in Kenya when Ouko was killed. Airaghi had been expelled from the country for his role in the Kisumu molasses contract tussle in 1989. Officially, he was charged with interference in government matters. So, in 1991, he and Briner-Mattern were resident in Marbella, Spain.
It was from Europe that the so-called “reputable company” ‘BAK Group’, was making its claims on the Kenyan government. However, investigation into this group of companies uncovers a great many irregularities.
Various ‘BAK’ entities were found to have used four different names and two addresses in the three years that followed Ouko’s death. At the time of the minister's murder not one of the BAK companies had ever been formally registered and there was no evidence that any one of them ever actually traded.
In fact, the fifth iteration of a ‘BAK Group’ company, ‘BAK Group Marianne Briner and Partner’, was only registered with Switzerland’s Register of Company’s on the February 13, 1990, the very day that Ouko was murdered.
It is unclear how these facts, as well as the fact of these various ‘BAK’ entities facing liquidation proceedings in every country they operated, eluded the Scotland Yard investigators. What is clear is what the 'BAK directors’ sought to get out of their part in the investigation. After Ouko’s murder and the registration of ‘BAK Group’, Briner-Mattern’s claim for compensation for losses supposedly incurred in relation to the Molasses Project increased overnight from $150,000 to $5.975 million.
The tall tales told and how they unravelled
The behaviour of this now-notorious pair would eventually catch up with them, even if only insofar as it has now undermined the “truthful and honest” label Troon once gave them.
It was perhaps best put by one of the men unwillingly embroiled in this story of slander and salacious tales. After Briner-Mattern’s PSC interview, in which she claimed to have scuttled Raila's presidential bid, the great man was interviewed for his thoughts on the claims.
Asked about the friendship Briner-Mattern had suggested at, as well as other claims she had made in relation to him, Raila had this to say: “If that is what she is saying, then her entire story may be fake.”