Tycoon: Former Kenyan president took bribes

Former Kenyan President President Daniel arap Moi accepted bribes, a company chief at the centre of the East African nation’s biggest financial scandal told an inquiry today.

Kamlesh Pattni, the major shareholder of Goldenberg International, said he gave Moi £41,000 (€61,000) and an unspecified number of shares in the company at a meeting set up by a senior intelligence official in August 1990.

After taking the money, Moi approved Goldenberg’s proposed business plan and promised to call top government officials and give them the go-ahead to help the business, Pattni told the judicial inquiry in Nairobi.

The inquiry, which opened in March 2003, is investigating why Moi’s notoriously corrupt government paid hundreds of millions of pounds to Goldenberg for purported exports of gold and diamond jewellery, despite the fact that Kenya has negligible gold deposits and no diamonds.

Affidavits and court documents filed before the inquiry began indicate the Goldenberg scandal involves as much as £565m (€840.9m) in corrupt transactions.

A number of former senior government officials – as well some members of Kenya’s new administration – have been implicated in the scandal. But Pattni’s testimony is the first evidence to directly link Moi to Goldenberg.