An activist has moved to court challenging the validity of the legal notice by Treasury CS Ukur Yatani that strips billions of assets from parastatals and putting them in a private company.
Okiya Omtatah claims the CS secretly used a private advocate and not the Attorney General to form a private company limited by shares called the Kenya Development Corporation Limited.
He further states that Yatani purported to have the private company vested with public assets worth billions of shillings, stripped from three financial state-owned enterprises, including the Industrial and Commercial Development Corporation, the Tourism Finance Corporation and the IDB Capital Limited.
He is seeking an order to suspend the secretly enacted KDCL through which the CS unlawfully and unconstitutionally purports to strip assets worth billions of shillings from the three parastatals.
“Since it was secretly enacted without public participation, the petitioner only learnt of the Vesting Order and the impugned changes affecting the three parastatals from an article titled 'Hasty Merger of Parastatals Risky,' which was published in the Daily Nation on August 4, 2021,” he said.
According to Omtatah, by vesting the assets of the three public entities in KDC, Yatani has created a mechanism for privatising public assets worth billions of shillings without having to go through the Privatisation Commission.
“Under Kenyan law, parastatals can only be privatised through the Privatisation Commission. But by vesting the vast assets of the three parastatals in a private company, the KDC, the CS has created an illegal way to avoid the Privatisation Commission,” Omtatah argues.
He also argues it's the directors of the KDC, and not the Privatisation Commission, who decide what to do with the public assets, without being accountable to the public.
He has accused Yatani of usurping the powers of Parliament by merging the Industrial and Commercial Development Corporation, the Tourism Finance Corporation and the IDB Capital Limited.
Omtatah says the CS also handpicked five people and appointed them to the Board of the Kenya Development Corporation Limited using powers reserved exclusively for the President under Section 7(3) of the State Corporations Act.
He says Yatani ignored articles 79 and 80 of the corporation’s articles of association, which provide for the appointment of the board.
Yatani has also been accused of appointing his personal assistant Christopher Huka to be Kenya Development Corporation Limited director general.
-Edited by SKanyara