The Kiambu Land Syndicate: How a Local Coffee Farmer, a CBK Governor, and Bidco Billionaire Triggered a 10-Year War for Tatu City, and Lost
THE BOARDLOT SULTAN • CAPITAL INTELLIGENCE
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A deep-dive into the raw anatomy of a KES 240 billion frontier-market corporate war, where local elite power brokers clashed with international capital.
By @boardlotsultan
June 2026 • Premium Long-Form Investigative Analysis
In frontier capital markets, the ultimate asset class isn’t equity or debt—it is land. But land in a rapidly expanding metropolitan zone like Nairobi isn’t just real estate; it is a political and legal battlefield.
To the casual observer driving through Kiambu County, Tatu City represents a sleek, master-planned satellite metropolis designed to de-congest Kenya’s capital. But behind the glitzy billboards and glass-fronted industrial parks lies the corporate equivalent of a scorched-earth guerrilla war.
For a value investor or financial analyst, the decade-long war for Tatu City isn’t just an entertaining thriller; it is the ultimate textbook case study on counterparty risk, multi-jurisdictional legal warfare, and what happens when Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) attempts to strip power from entrenched local oligarchs.
This is the unfiltered post-mortem of how a simple local coffee farm introduction transformed into a international legal war of attrition.
Section 1: The Kiambu Syndicate & The Complex Corporate Maze
The Kiambu Origin Point
Long before the futuristic master plans were drawn up, the Tatu City story began in the rich, red volcanic soils of Kiambu’s colonial-era coffee estates. In 2008, Stephen Mwagiru, a well-connected local coffee farmer with deep ties to the area’s agricultural networks, identified a golden opportunity. A Belgian multi-national corporation, Socfinaf, wanted to liquidate and exit its massive 2,500-hectare portfolio of sprawling coffee plantations (operating under the name Kofinaf).
The Power Alliance
Recognizing that he lacked the immense financial muscle to independently close a transaction of this magnitude—valued at over $80 million—Mwagiru formed a local syndicate. He brought in two heavy-hitting local power brokers to give the deal institutional weight and political insulation:
Nahashon Nyagah: The former Governor of the Central Bank of Kenya (CBK), who provided immense regulatory credibility and deep access to the state bureaucratic apparatus.
Vimal Shah: The billionaire Chairman of Bidco Africa, who lent the project premium corporate prestige and local commercial gravitas.
With the land optioned but severely lacking the cash required to cross the finish line, the local trio pitched the project to Stephen Jennings, a gritty New Zealand multi-millionaire and founder of Renaissance Capital (later Rendeavour). Jennings agreed to anchor the international financing consortium, supplying the bulk of the hard capital to transform Mwagiru’s local land lead into a KES 240 billion mega-project.
The Structural Flaw
From its inception, the partnership was built on a legal fault line. To manage the massive transaction and protect incoming foreign investors, the partners deliberately designed an incredibly complex, multi-layered web of local and offshore holding companies.
The corporate hierarchy converged around obscure vehicles like Cedar IV and Manhattan Coffee Investment Holding. While this labyrinth of shells was initially built to shield investors and optimize taxes, it inadvertently created the perfect tactical camouflage for what was about to become an ugly corporate insurgency.
In Jennings, Vimal and Nyagah Did Not Know the Beast They Had Poked in the Anus
Before Stephen Jennings ever set foot in Kenya to build the 5,000-acre Tatu City empire, he earned his stripes in the cutthroat, hyper-vicious financial trenches of post-Soviet Russia. Dubbed the “Kiwi Oligarch,” Jennings moved to Moscow in 1993, eventually co-founding the elite investment banking powerhouse Renaissance Group (RenGroup). He wasn’t just a corporate manager; he was a hardened economic combatant operating at the highest levels of frontier-market capitalism.
When local Kenyan power brokers like Nahashon Nyagah and Vimal Shah attempted to sideline Jennings in Nairobi, they fundamentally misunderstood the pedigree of the international capitalist they were trying to outmaneuver. Jennings had already survived and thrived in an environment dominated by the Kremlin, state-backed monopolies, and multi-billion-dollar liquidations.
An investigative breakdown of Jennings’ Russian track record reveals exactly why the local Kenyan syndicate was profoundly outclassed:
The Ultimate Frontier Credential (”The Kiwi Oligarch”): Jennings spent over 20 years pioneering investment banking in highly volatile emerging markets. As the CEO of RenGroup and Renaissance Capital (RenCap), he navigated the wild, unregulated corporate warfare of Russia in the 1990s and 2000s—a landscape exponentially more lethal than the Milimani commercial courts.
The Yukos Oil Crossfire: Jennings was a central figure in the fallout of the infamous Yukos Oil Company breakup. After the Russian government launched a politically motivated campaign to dismantle Yukos (the oil empire of Putin-rival Mikhail Khodorkovsky), its multi-billion-dollar assets were put up for state-administered auctions. Jennings and RenGroup didn’t flinch; they actively formed a high-stakes consortium to bid for these toxic, highly contested assets.
Direct Access to the Kremlin: In a high-stakes London lawsuit brought by former Yukos shareholders, court documents revealed that Jennings’ outfit possessed “very close relationships... with the Kremlin”. Internal investment memorandums (dubbed Project Surplus and Project Big Easy) explicitly identified Jennings as the specific operative weaponized to personally check the “Kremlin’s reaction” to massive corporate bids.
A Master of Multi-Jurisdictional Litigation: Long before dealing with Kenyan injunctions, Jennings was already veteran armor against massive, international legal assaults. He aggressively and successfully defended himself in high-court battles spanning London and the Netherlands against international consortiums seeking tens of millions of dollars in damages. His legal team systematically dismissed these complex cross-border claims as “misconceived and vexatious”.
The Bottom Line: Nahashon Nyagah and Vimal Shah treated the Tatu City dispute like a standard local land-grabbing maneuver. They deployed local court caveats, file-tampering, and police intimidation against a man who had spent two decades looking down the barrels of Russian oligarchs, state-backed corporate raids, and the Kremlin itself. In trying to corner Stephen Jennings, the local minority faction had poked a financial apex predator—and they paid for it with total dilution and eviction from the board.
Section 2: The Capital Breach & The $11 Million Crack
The Friction Point
The underlying friction of the Tatu City deal is a recurring theme in frontier markets: the clash between Sweat Equity and Hard Cash. To maintain their large, highly lucrative equity claims on the board, the local partners (Shah, Nyagah, and Mwagiru) promised to co-invest and match the capital injections of the foreign consortium. However, when the time came to cut multi-million-dollar checks to finalize the land acquisition, the local syndicate ran into a severe liquidity squeeze. They simply could not raise their share of the money.
The Fatal Accommodation
Determined to keep the momentum going and prevent the Socfinaf land option from expiring, Jennings’ Rendeavour made a fatal accommodation: they advanced the local partners an $11 million loan to cover their financial entry into the project.
The Pivot to War
The loan was never fully repaid. Realizing that their inability to match future cash calls would inevitably lead to their stakes being aggressively diluted by Jennings’ deep foreign pockets, the local partners went on the offensive.
They shifted the goalposts, claiming they were legally entitled to a permanent 50% stake in the multi-billion-shilling enterprise based entirely on their “sweat equity,” political cover, and Mwagiru’s original land procurement. Rendeavour countered with cold corporate math: because the local partners hadn’t backed up their shares with cash, their true economic shareholding had dwindled to near zero.
The gentleman’s agreement evaporated, and the battle lines were drawn.
Section 3: The Local Injunction Insurgency (Nairobi Courts)
The Strategy of Sabotage
Realizing they could easily be outvoted on the board by the international majority, the local syndicate turned to a classic defensive playbook: weaponizing the Kenyan judicial system. The strategy was simple: if they couldn’t control the KES 240 billion asset, they would legally freeze it so that no one else could profit from it either.
The Winding-Up Trap (2010–2013)
In late 2010, Stephen Mwagiru and his mother, Rosemary Wanja, hit the corporate nuclear option. Acting as disgruntled minority shareholders, they filed an audacious petition in the Nairobi High Court to wind up and completely dissolve Tatu City Limited.
Under company law, a pending winding-up petition acts as a massive legal caveat. For over three years, this single judicial maneuver held the entire project hostage. It froze physical development, completely panicked international buyers, and blocked Rendeavour from selling off land parcels to service the project’s development loans.
The Registry Forgery Allegations
As the civil battle intensified, the warfare spilled over into the criminal arena, marking the darkest turning point of the local insurgency. Foreign investors discovered that sweeping caveats had been placed on nine prime land parcels within the project. Rendeavour immediately accused Mwagiru of orchestrating a dangerous fraud inside the state corporate archives.
They alleged that Mwagiru had filed forged affidavits and utilized a falsified Form CR12—the official company registry document that dictates who holds directorships and shares—supposedly issued by the Assistant Registrar of Companies. The document falsely claimed that Mwagiru and his mother were the sole legitimate controllers of the firm. This triggered a relentless criminal investigation by the Directorate of Criminal Investigations (DCI), culminating in Mwagiru being formally charged with forgery and uttering false documents.
The Internal Coup Attempt
While Mwagiru fought in the registries, Rendeavour launched explosive allegations against former CBK Governor Nahashon Nyagah. The foreign investors claimed that Nyagah had abused his local administrative leverage to clandestinely attempt an internal corporate coup.
Court filings alleged that Nyagah attempted to re-register and transfer valuable Tatu City land shares to a tight circle of close proxies, including his sister, his personal driver, and members of his local church congregation, in an effort to alienate the land away from the foreign parent company.
Section 4: The London Shadow Trial (The LCIA Judgment)
Bypassing Kenyan Courts
By 2015, the international investors realized that fighting a war of attrition in the local courts against well-connected political elites was a losing game. The system was too slow, easily manipulated by endless interim injunctions, and vulnerable to local political undercurrents.
Rendeavour decided to bypass the Nairobi gridlock entirely. They bypassed the domestic courts by invoking the strict international arbitration clauses embedded deep within their original shareholder agreements, dragging the local syndicate to neutral ground: The London Court of International Arbitration (LCIA).
The Hammer Falls (February 2018)
Away from the comfort of localized political cover, the local power brokers faced a brutal legal reckoning. In February 2018, the London arbitrator delivered a devastating, definitive ruling that completely stripped away the local syndicate’s corporate defenses.
The LCIA found that Vimal Shah, Nahashon Nyagah, and their partners had engaged in “false misrepresentation” and acted fraudulently regarding their capital deposit claims, soundly rejecting their “sweat equity” arguments.
The Penalty
The London court didn’t just rule against the local trio; it hit them with a massive financial hammer. The LCIA ordered Shah, Nyagah, and their co-defendants to pay $17 million (approx. KES 1.7 Billion at the time) in damages, unpaid interest, and legal costs to Rendeavour.
The Offshore Chase & Partner Infighting
When the local billionaires refused to honor the London arbitral award, the warfare went global. Rendeavour leveraged the judgment and chased the syndicate to the supreme courts of Mauritius, successfully moving to enforce the payment orders and freeze the offshore assets held under Manhattan Coffee Investment Holding.
Under the immense heat of global asset freezes and criminal indictments, the local alliance experienced a fascinating collapse of internal solidarity. Honor among thieves evaporated as Mwagiru and Nyagah turned on each other, launching bitter parallel lawsuits in Mauritius. In May 2015, Mwagiru won an offshore corporate battle that successfully diluted Nyagah’s shareholding in their joint proxy vehicle down to a measly 1.78%.
Section 5: The Aftermath & The Sultan’s Playbook
The Ultimate Survival
Ultimately, Stephen Jennings and Rendeavour survived the elite siege through a relentless, cash-backed war of attrition. By utilizing the High Court’s mandatory buyout orders, Rendeavour systematically appraised Mwagiru’s minority shares, cut him a check, and legally evicted him from the premises. Through a combination of international arbitral awards, DCI criminal leverage, and aggressive corporate restructurings, the foreign consortium completely cleared the board of its original local pioneers.
The Corporate Playbook
For the sophisticated investor, the Tatu City files reveal the exact operational playbook required for foreign capital to survive a hostile takeover by local elites in an emerging market:
Criminal Leverage to Break Civil Deadlocks: When local partners use endless civil injunctions to stall a project, the counter-move is to unearth criminal elements (such as registry forgery or tax evasion) to bring in state actors like the DCI, shifting the power dynamic.
Offshore Jurisdictional Moats: Never allow a multi-million-dollar venture to be governed solely by local courts. Anchoring the dispute resolution mechanism in neutral international hubs like the LCIA or Mauritius ensures that raw corporate law triumphs over local political influence.
Aggressive PR and Stamina: Rendeavour understood that managing public perception and maintaining deep capital reserves to fund a ten-year legal war is just as critical as the physical real estate development itself.
The End of the Hegemony: How Nyagah and Vimal Shah Were Evicted
The final removal of Nahashon Nyagah and Vimal Shah from the shareholding and governance structure of Tatu City was executed through a ruthless, multi-jurisdictional financial pincer movement. Instead of relying purely on a gridlocked Kenyan judicial system, the foreign majority directors combined operational decapitation in Nairobi with an aggressive international arbitral offensive that struck at the heart of the local partners’ offshore asset structures.
The mechanical process of their eviction unfolded across three distinct phases:
1. The Operational Decapitation (The 2015 Nairobi Board Resolutions)
Before attacking the underlying equity, Stephen Jennings and the foreign majority directors used their superior voting power to strip the local duo of their corporate mandates. On February 5, 2015, a meeting of the Board of Directors was convened where the foreign majority passed a series of sweeping resolutions.
The board formally revoked Nahashon Nyagah’s appointment as Chairman of the Board of Directors for both Tatu City Limited and Kofinaf, replacing him with a foreign nominee. Concurrently, Nyagah was removed as a mandatory signatory to all corporate bank accounts. This operational decapitation completely severed the local syndicate’s visibility and control over the project’s financial flows, locking them out of the cockpit of the enterprise.
2. The Offshore Target: Attacking Manhattan Coffee Investment Holding
While the local power brokers maintained a visible presence in Kenya, their multi-billion-shilling ownership was heavily nested offshore. Their equity was primarily held via Manhattan Coffee Investment Holding (MCIH), a proxy corporate vehicle registered in the low-tax jurisdiction of Mauritius. MCIH co-owned the master parent holding companies (Cedar IV Limited and CedarSoc Limited) alongside Jennings’ Cypriot vehicle, SCF Holdings II.
To permanently destroy their ownership leverage, Jennings bypassed the local gridlock and triggered a contractually mandated trap by dragging the dispute to the London Court of International Arbitration (LCIA). In February 2018, the London arbitrator delivered a devastating, unappealable final ruling. The court found that Nyagah, Shah, and their associates had engaged in “false misrepresentation” regarding their capital deposit claims, soundly rejecting their “sweat equity” arguments and ordering them to pay $17 million (approx. KES 1.7 Billion) in damages and costs to Rendeavour.
3. The Mauritius Enforcement and Internal Dilution
The final blow to their shareholding didn’t happen in Nairobi; it was executed in the courts of Mauritius. When Shah and Nyagah failed to settle the $17 million London debt within the required 28 days, Jennings’ SCF Holdings immediately moved to the Supreme Court of Mauritius. They successfully weaponized the global payment order to freeze and attach the assets of Manhattan Coffee Investment Holding (MCIH).
By foreclosing on the debt against the local partners’ offshore shares—and combining it with massive, structured capital calls that the cash-squeezed local partners failed to match—Jennings systematically diluted their equity to zero. In a final twist of internal betrayal, Stephen Mwagiru launched separate legal strikes against his former ally in Mauritius, winning an order that diluted Nahashon Nyagah’s individual shareholding within their joint proxy vehicle down to a microscopic 1.78%, completing the systematic decimation of the original Kiambu syndicate.
The Bidco Pivot
Vimal Shah fought a brutal 10-year legal war against Stephen Jennings, lost his shares, and then turned around and built a Bidco factory inside Tatu City. Is this the ultimate example of ‘no permanent enemies, only permanent interests’ in Kenyan business, or did the foreign investors simply make an offer too lucrative to refuse? What’s your take on the backdoor pragmatism of Nairobi’s billionaire class?
The Sultan’s Postscript: The Bidco Irony
In the theatre of frontier-market corporate warfare, there are no permanent enemies—only permanent interests.
While Vimal Shah was legally eviscerated at the shareholder level, stripped of his board seat, and chased through the offshore courts of Mauritius, the ultimate resolution of his relationship with Tatu City highlights the pragmatic realism of high-finance billionaires.
In a fascinating turn of events, once the dust from the legal war had settled, Vimal Shah’s multi-billion-shilling fast-moving consumer goods conglomerate, Bidco Africa, became one of the major blue-chip manufacturing anchors inside the newly minted Tatu City Special Economic Zone (SEZ). Bidco acquired a massive tract of land within the industrial park to construct a state-of-the-art consumer goods factory and distribution facility.
For the astute market analyst, this architectural monument speaks volumes. It strongly suggests that while the front-facing battle for equity control was fought with absolute ruthlessness, a pragmatic, backdoor operational deal was eventually struck. Shah may have lost the war for the master developer’s throne, but as a corporate titan, he ultimately recognized that the infrastructure Jennings built was too commercially lucrative to ignore. Business, in the end, overrode the bloodletting.
The Legal Gladiators: The Advocates Who Fought the Tatu City War
In frontier capital markets, the difference between a successful multi-billion-shilling corporate asset and total liquidation is the quality of the legal infantry you deploy. In Phase I of the Tatu City war, the boardroom feud quickly transformed into a high-stakes litigation chess match inside the Milimani and Commercial Law Courts of Nairobi.
The primary local and foreign factions didn’t just hire lawyers; they hired the most aggressive, highly litigious, and politically connected legal minds in the republic.
Here is the roll call of the key advocates who spearheaded the original litigation trenches:
1. Senior Counsel Ahmednasir Abdullahi (“The Grand Mullah”)
The Client: Tatu City Limited, Kofinaf Limited, and the foreign majority consortium led by Stephen Jennings (Rendeavour).
The Tactical Role: Ahmednasir Abdullahi was brought in as the heavyweight legal closer for the foreign investors. When the local board faction split, the foreign majority shareholders convened a critical board meeting to formally terminate the services of the local syndicate’s legal choices and appointed Ahmednasir to lead the company’s macro litigation strategy.
The Execution: Abdullahi successfully spearheaded the legal counter-offensive to systematically clean up the court registries. He engineered the withdrawal of several unauthorized and paralyzing civil suits that had been filed in the names of Tatu City and Kofinaf by the local partners, breaking the judicial deadlock in Nairobi.
2. Nelson Havi (Former LSK President)
The Client: The local minority syndicate—specifically former CBK Governor Nahashon Nyagah, Bidco Chairman Vimal Shah, and Stephen Mwagiru.
The Tactical Role: If Ahmednasir was the shield for international capital, Nelson Havi was the primary operational sword for the local power brokers. Havi masterminded the aggressive “injunction insurgency,” utilizing the local courts to file a barrage of preemptive civil lawsuits (such as Nairobi High Court Case No. 46 of 2015) designed to stop the foreign majority from sidelining his clients or diluting their equity.
The Conflict: Havi’s deployment was so disruptive that the majority board explicitly passed resolutions specifically targeting him—expelling his law firm (Havi and Company Advocates) from purporting to represent Tatu City and Kofinaf, and later fighting him up to the Court of Appeal over his authority to sue the company’s own majority directors.
3. Robert Githui
The Client: Stephen Mwagiru and his mother, Rosemary Wanja.
The Tactical Role: Robert Githui acted as the immediate legal architect behind Mwagiru’s initial, hyper-aggressive localized land offensive.
The Criminal Fallouts: Githui didn’t just argue civil matters; he became deeply entangled in the fallout of the Registry Forgery Scandal. When the DCI and document examiners concluded that a June 2011 corporate registry report (Form CR12) used to place caveats on nine prime Tatu City properties was an absolute forgery, the state didn’t just charge Mwagiru—they formally arraigned Robert Githui alongside his clients as a co-accused party to the criminal conspiracy.
4. Edward Osundwa
The Client: Nahashon Nyagah.
The Tactical Role: A key supporting advocate within the local syndicate’s legal defense ring.
The Heat: When the Directorate of Criminal Investigations (DCI) recommended the immediate arrest and criminal prosecution of Nahashon Nyagah over an alleged Sh5.3 billion conspiracy to illicitly transfer Tatu City / Kofinaf land shares to local proxies, Osundwa found himself directly in the line of fire. Along with Havi and Nyagah, Osundwa had to aggressively battle in court to secure urgent conservatory orders to block their imminent arrest by state detectives.
5. Justice Mumbi Ngugi (Then High Court Judge)
The Judicial Arbiter: While not an advocate for either party, her inclusion in the story is vital for understanding the legal ping-pong.
The Ruling: In November 2013, Justice Mumbi Ngugi temporarily handed the local partners a massive lifeline by halting the state’s criminal forgery indictment against Mwagiru and his lawyer, ruling that the parallel criminal tracks amounted to an abuse of the court process. (This decision was later aggressively overturned by the Court of Appeal judges Patrick Kiage, Wanjiru Karanja, and Fatuma Sichale, who gave Tatu City the green light to pursue the criminal forgery charges to the bitter end).
The Permanent Legacy
Today, Tatu City stands as a thriving, fully operational Special Economic Zone (SEZ), but its foundations are permanently marked by the scars of the Kiambu Soil Syndicate. It serves as an enduring, sober lesson for capital markets: in the high-stakes game of frontier infrastructure, the initial local hand-shake is rarely the final chapter. The game is only won by those who possess the structural safeguards, international legal leverage, and financial stamina to survive the long, grueling war of attrition.
Rendeavour’s Pan-African Blueprint: Beyond the Kiambu Battlefield
The Tatu City “war of attrition” served as more than just a crucible for Stephen Jennings and his team—it functioned as a high-stakes, real-world laboratory. The lessons learned in the Nairobi courtroom—regarding the necessity of absolute control over bulk infrastructure, the power of SEZ designation, and the importance of jurisdictional independence—were codified into a repeatable, pan-African “city-building” playbook.
Today, Rendeavour has effectively exported the Tatu City model across the continent. By securing massive land parcels in the expansion corridors of Africa’s fastest-growing urban hubs, the group is positioning itself as the primary utility and infrastructure provider where state capacity often hits a ceiling.
The Continental Portfolio
Rendeavour’s footprint now spans over 30,000 acres across five countries, each project designed to act as a “plug-and-play” ecosystem for industrialization and urban living:
CityLocationStrategic FocusAlaro CityLekki Free Zone, NigeriaLogistics, deep-sea port proximity, and manufacturing.Appolonia CityGreater Accra, GhanaMixed-use residential and light industrial satellite city.Roma ParkLusaka, ZambiaCommercial and residential flagship development.Kiswishi CityLubumbashi, DRCMining-linked infrastructure and urban development.
The “Infrastructure-First” Philosophy
Unlike traditional developers who focus on individual building projects, Rendeavour’s model is predicated on bulk infrastructure delivery. By laying down primary substations, high-capacity utility networks, and asphalt road grids ahead of demand, they create a de-risked environment that attracts multinational blue-chip tenants.
This model has recently gained significant institutional recognition. In May 2026, Rendeavour was appointed as the inaugural implementation partner for the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA). This partnership is a massive validation of the “Tatu Playbook,” signaling that the developer is now officially tasked with scaling its integrated economic zones to support intra-African trade and cross-border industrialization.
From Conflict to Connectivity
For the astute observer, the transition from the boardroom brawls in Nairobi to the continental-scale projects in Abuja, Accra, and Lubumbashi is revealing. The “Kiwi Oligarch” who cut his teeth fighting for control in Kenya has successfully pivoted from legal combat to the business of systemic urban stability.
By creating these private municipalities, Rendeavour is effectively attempting to solve the biggest hurdle to African investment: the lack of predictable, high-quality, and trade-ready physical infrastructure. Whether they can navigate the localized socio-political complexities in these newer markets as effectively as they finally subdued the “Kiambu Syndicate” remains the ultimate test of their long-term, cross-border ambition.
Coming Up in Part II: The Industrial Juggernaut
Having broken the back of the local elite siege, Stephen Jennings and Rendeavour didn’t just celebrate a courtroom victory—they unleashed a high-velocity capital deployment model that forever altered the geography of East African logistics. In the next chapter of this premium series, we step away from the gritty corridors of the Milimani Law Courts and into the high-stakes world of infrastructure economics. We will dissect ‘The Industrial Juggernaut’: how Tatu City successfully lobbied for Special Economic Zone (SEZ) status, engineered a brilliant B2B ‘projects-within-projects’ residential playbook, and sparked a multi-billion-shilling corporate stampede that left Nairobi’s traditional industrial zones in the dust. Stay tuned to The Boardlot Sultan for the definitive breakdown of how a toxic corporate battlefield transformed into one of the most successful private municipalities on the African continent.
3 parties; seller, broker and buyer. The local guys were brokers to the deal but tried to act as buyers and become owners through holding company without actually paying cash. The buyers were also trying to skirt the rules of foreign ownership of freehold land. The court battles was thus between parties that weren't straightforward from the word go. In such a high stake transaction, knowing the rules, doing due diligence and each player having clear defined roles are key.
Interesting. I wonder if Mwagiru, Nyagah & Shah would do things differently if they could hop into a time machine & start the whole process over. Spending almost a decade fighting a back & forth battle with well heeled $ investors just seems counterproductive. I'm sure they could have come to a more amicable agreement for their 'sweat equity'.