Monthly Archives: January 2011

Bank Enforcement CYA

The Finance Act 2010 is now available at kenyalaw.org.

It covers a lot of grey areas generated by the Central Banks of Kenya’s (CBK) handling of the Grand Regency sale and the Charterhouse Bank closure and gives powers and direction that provide some legal safe cover (but not retroactively).

It requires funds recovered by the Kenya Anti-Corruption Commission to go to the Government’s Consolidated Fund (78) and gives CBK powers to (peek and) take action at a bank based on (a bank’s own) auditor report (66) and specifies harsher actions that may be taken against banks who violate share capital limits (67).

Other provisions:

  • Banks can lend up to 40% of their balance sheets to real estate (up from 25%).
  • Beer prices up 20%.
  • Copyright inspectors can summon police officers to arrest piracy offenders (77).
  • Abandoned vehicle number plates should be submitted to Government for cancelation (40).

Internet Security in Kenya – Part II

This week, the Kenya Police website was hacked and it sparked some debate on security investments and their effectiveness.

Mid last year, a forum was held in Nairobi to review the state of internet security and some of the findings were that hacking and computer fraud were relatively easy to perpetrate so in some organizations and the problem is only going to get worse owing faster internet speeds and failure to address risks around people, processes, and technology in regional organizations and financial institutions.

Farewell Mars Group Kenya

While the world awaits the release of more cable from Wikileaks, some unfortunate news comes from Kenya where the equivalent of Wikileaks – the anti-corruption watchdog Mars Group Kenya – inexplicably took down their website in mid December.

The reasons for this are unclear, but (via @twitter) it appears it came about when someone tried to create an application to access their vast database – and this provoked the founders to take down the site and post a message that their database and contents therein are copywrited and invited anyone who wanted to use it to e-mail them for permission.

Mars Group Kenya (created by Mwalimu Mati, former Director of Transparency International Kenya) has been a great resource of information for taxpayers, students and analysts looking at corruption. Their site had official and unofficial, unreleased and secret reports of the Kenya government, Kenya parliament and auditors) mainly on corruption in Kenya. Also their budget reports on government spending have come to be appreciated and even caused the Kenya Finance Minister to re-check his numbers going into the 2009 budget.

Pepsi vs. Coke

silent invasion

Pepsi were expected to re-enter the Kenya market via a full blast push, like Airtel’s onslaught on Safaricom.

But with Kenya being an long time entrenched Coke market – bottling plant partnerships around the country with the quasi-government (ICDC) and politicos, a different mode has been adopted, with production/bottling in Mauritius as opposed to having a plant in Kenya.

For many years Pepsi used to be hard to find in neglected corner shelves of the main supermarkets, but over the last few weeks that barrier has been closed with plenty of Pepsi (and Mountain Dew) now priced the same as coke (both 45/= $0.55 for 1 500ML plastic bottle) and prominently placed, sometimes occupying the same shelf space. Previously Pepsi was priced at almost double the price of coke (60/= when Coke was 40/=).