By The Weekly Vision Reporter
There is a particular kind of theft that requires no violence, no disguise, and often no accomplice outside the building where it happens. It requires only that a programme be declared dead on paper while its bank account is quietly kept breathing. That, according to court documents filed by Kenya’s Ethics and Anti-Corruption Commission, is precisely what allegedly happened to a modest rural finance programme that closed in 2019, and whose accounts, investigators say, kept moving money for years after its mandate had expired
The Programme for Rural Outreach of Financial Innovations and Technologies, PROFIT for short, was never meant to be famous. Jointly financed by the Kenyan government and the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), a specialised United Nations agency, it pooled more than $30.8 million over nearly a decade with a modest, unglamorous mission: extending credit, savings products and insurance to smallholder farmers, pastoralists, artisanal fishers and rural women who had never held a formal bank account. IFAD’s own supervision missions to the programme logged reach into the hundreds of thousands of beneficiaries across the country’s driest and most economically fragile counties.
On 31 December 2019, PROFIT closed. Its mandate was declared fulfilled. Its donor funding had run out. By every administrative measure, the programme ceased to exist. Its bank account, investigators now allege, did not.
According to court documents filed by the Ethics and Anti-Corruption Commission (EACC), senior National Treasury officials kept the PROFIT operations account at Co-operative Bank of Kenya alive years after the programme’s official closure, and used it as a conduit to siphon out a sum the Commission places at Sh1,554,455,284.35, north of Sh1.55 billion, disbursed by the Treasury itself in the name of a project that no longer had a mandate, and invoking the authority of a donor that had long since walked away. It is important to state plainly, and to keep stating, that these remain allegations before a court that has yet to hear a defence: no finding of guilt has been made against anyone named in this article.
The mechanism, as laid out in EACC’s filings, exploited a gap that should never have survived basic internal audit. Genuine PROFIT payment vouchers required two layers of sign-off, certification by a holder of Authority to Incur Expenditure, followed by an accounting officer’s approval. The vouchers EACC alleges were used to move the money skipped the first layer entirely, relying on a single signature to authorise disbursements from a programme with no staff, no offices and no ongoing activity. EACC investigators say the vouchers continued to cite IFAD by name, as though the donor were still actively requesting disbursements, years after IFAD’s involvement had ended.
At the centre of the alleged scheme, EACC’s court papers name Billy Otieno Obango, PROFIT’s former accountant, and Gladys Juliet Chepkarat, described in the filings as his collaborator. The Commission alleges that Obango personally withdrew Sh799.84 million in cash from the PROFIT account, a figure that, in a banking system where a single transaction above Sh1 million is meant to trigger reporting obligations, raises uncomfortable questions about what, exactly, the banks and the Treasury’s own internal controls were doing while this was allegedly underway.
When the Co-operative Bank account’s capacity appeared to run short, the scheme allegedly escalated. In October 2022, nearly three years after PROFIT’s official closure, Obango and Chepkarat are accused of opening an entirely new account at KCB Bank Kenya, in the PROFIT programme’s name, using forged documents. Sh175.3 million was subsequently channelled into that account, of which Sh157.8 million allegedly moved out via cheques backed by fabricated paperwork.
In early 2023, a further Sh206 million in what EACC describes as “residual” PROFIT funds was transferred from the Co-operative Bank account into an account belonging to a separate, still-active IFAD-backed initiative, the Rural Kenya Financial Inclusion Facility (RK-FINFA), held at Housing Finance Bank. Whether that transfer represented an attempt to move the money through a legitimate programme’s books, or something more innocuous, is described in the filings as part of the ongoing investigation and has not been determined by any court.
EACC’s filings do not stop at the two alleged principal actors. Named as co-respondents or persons of interest are a roster of Treasury officials, John Maina Muriithi and Nemwel Moturi Mutonya, both senior accountants; Lilian Wanjiku Dishon, senior deputy accountant general; George Kihara, head of the Treasury’s accounting unit; and Susan Warukira, a principal accountant, alongside John Ngure Kabutha and Sylvia Awino Obango.
The Commission’s case against this second tier, as set out in its filings, is not that they personally pocketed the money, but that their positions obliged them to detect and halt a haemorrhage that instead continued, on the Commission’s own reconstruction, for years. None of this has been tested in court, and each is entitled to answer the allegations in due course.
One name in the transaction trail carries particular political weight, and deserves to be handled with corresponding care. Court records show that on 8 December 2016, three years before PROFIT’s closure and long before any of the alleged fraud is said to have begun, then National Treasury Principal Secretary Kamau Thugge personally introduced Obango, Chepkarat and Muriithi as additional signatories to the PROFIT account.
Thugge went on to become Governor of the Central Bank of Kenya. Nothing in EACC’s filings alleges that Thugge had knowledge of, or was complicit in, the fraud that investigators say unfolded years later. The signatory addition was, on its face, a routine administrative act at a time when the programme was still fully operational, years before the alleged scheme is said to have begun. His name appears in the paper trail of an account that would later become the alleged instrument of a billion-shilling theft; nothing more, and nothing less, is claimed against him.
EACC’s asset-recovery filings sketch a property portfolio the Commission alleges was built almost entirely from the diverted proceeds: a four-storey hotel in Eldoret’s town centre; two apartments in the Stoni Athi Phase I development in Athi River; a flat in Stoni Athi purchased from the National Housing Corporation for Sh8.85 million; four housing units in Kamulu’s Avana Garden Estate worth roughly Sh18.1 million; and, through a company the Commission describes as a proxy vehicle whose directors are Chepkarat’s children, three houses in Eldoret’s Racecourse area, bought with Sh104.8 million EACC alleges is traceable to the scheme. A second company, Jarods Agency Limited, is alleged to have received a further Sh40.1 million from the PROFIT accounts after the programme’s official closure. These remain allegations advanced by EACC in its own court filings and have not been adjudicated.
In a development that speaks to how far this matter has already travelled beyond domestic accountability structures, IFAD confirmed in June 2026 that it has opened its own internal audit into the programme. The forfeiture suit will continue to be heard in the High Court, with the frozen assets remaining out of reach of the respondents until a judge determines the matter one way or the other.
