Yagnesh Mohanlala Devani is the proverbial cat with nine lives.
Last week, the Director of Public Prosecution (DPP) Renson Ingonga, whose request to drop charges against the billionaire businessman had initially been turned down by the court, finally had his way after key witnesses in the case, including former Energy minister Kiraitu Murungi, declined to testify.
It is not the first time that Devani, 59, has managed to wriggle out of the tight grip of the long arm of the law, in what is likely to bring disrepute to the country’s criminal justice system which has lately allowed several high-profile corruption cases to fall through the cracks.
It is yet another interesting chapter of a 16-year Triton Oil Scandal. Through his company, Triton Petroleum Company, Devani was accused of defrauding financiers of Sh7.6 billion.
Charges against Devani—a high-flying Kenyan-born businessman who hobnobbed with who-is-who is in the political circles—also paint a picture of how well-intentioned localisation programs are prone to abuse by well-connected individuals.
In 2008, Devani fled to the UK after being accused of defrauding the Kenyan government of billions of shillings through his company Triton Petroleum Company.
He spent 15 years in the UK fighting extradition before being returned to Kenya earlier this year. Before losing his appeal, Devani had cited the poor conditions of Kenya’s prisons as a reason why he did not want to be extradited to Kenya. He was detained at Kilimani Police Station for one day.
In April 2010, police were sure they had nailed him when they arrested a man who resembled Devani at the Jomo Kenyatta International Airport.
The man the police arrested had seven passports bearing different names. The police would later release the man after they found that his fingerprints and those of Devani (which he gave earlier while seeking a certificate of good conduct) did not match.
It would also emerge that the man the police had arrested, Devani Kalpesh Vasudev Mohanlal, was Devani’s nephew. He was traveling on a Kenyan passport and was arrested soon after he landed at the Jomo Kenyatta International Airport aboard an Air Arabia flight from New Delhi, the police said in a statement.
The then Immigration Minister the late Otieno Kajwang had earlier told a local radio station that his officers had confirmed the arrested man’s identity as that of the runaway Mr Devani and accused the police of misleading the public. He would later go mum over the issue even as the police insisted, they had arrested the wrong man.
At the heart of the Triton oil scandal was the open tender system (OTS) which was launched by the Mwai Kibaki-led National Rainbow Coalition (Narc) government to offer local businesses an opportunity in the lucrative petroleum industry which had been under the tight grip of foreign marketing companies.
“The Government was determined to assist small upcoming local oil marketing companies to enter the oil marketing business,” Kiraitu told Parliament.
Kiraitu, then the energy minister explained that the upcoming local oil marketing companies were unable to compete with the established oil marketing companies because they were poorly capitalized thus lacking the necessary funds to import crude oil and other oil products.
At the time, the local oil companies brought crude oil from oil majors for processing at the Kenya Petroleum Refinery (KPR) Limited at a premium of $4 per tonne above the landed cost. The local companies also imported refined petroleum products at prices which made it virtually difficult for them to grow financially and to compete well in the domestic oil market.
The cure for this, according to the Narc government, was the OTS through which small oil companies stopped paying the price premiums to oil majors for imported crude and other oil products.
With the OTS, the local oil companies are required to access credit to import these huge volumes of petroleum products through an innovative financing arrangement known as the Collateral Financing Arrangements (CFA) introduced in 2004.
Under the CFA, oil is held in trust by the Kenya Pipeline Company (KPC) for the financiers for an average of 30 days. It is only released to buyers upon written instructions of these financiers. However, in 2008, the authorities accused Devani of not getting such express authorization when he received the consignment from the KPC.
Because of that, Devani has been on the run for nearly 15 years.
In 2000, three years before Narc swept to power, Devani registered Triton Petroleum Company, as he angled for the launch of the OTS.
He was the executive chairman of Triton and he held 4,999,500 of the total share capital of five million shares. The remaining 500 shares were held by a company called Triton Network Solutions.
Devani enjoyed high-level connections with the political elite in the government, including several Cabinet ministers and permanent secretaries in his heyday.
In 2006, at a ceremony to open Triton’s LPG depot, he was spotted in the company of political bigwigs, including then-Vice President Moody Awori, several cabinet ministers, former President Raila Odinga, former Prime Minister Raila Odinga, and several permanent secretaries, the NGO Africog wrote in a publication.
He is believed to have funded prominent politicians during the 2007 General Elections campaigns.
Devani also attended the much-publicised Sh1 million a plate to fundraise for the late President Mwai Kibaki’s re-election campaign.
Other than securing lucrative deals to supply Kenya Power and Lighting Company, Triton was also the local partner of the Reliance Consortium, led by India’s largest private telecom service provider, Reliance Telecoms.
Mr Devani had confided in his friends that he aspired to emulate the achievements of the Reliance brothers, the Indian family with interest in petrochemical industries under the trading name Reliance Industries. Mukesh Ambani, India’s richest person, is the chairman of Reliance Industries.
