Troubled Keroche Breweries is set to fire over 400 employees today. This comes barely days after it was shut down by the Kenya Revenue Authority.
On Monday, Keroche chief executive officer Tabitha Karanja expressed how much the closure of her business had taken a toll on her. She said that she was struggling to find a way to tell her workers that they would be going home.
“I was thinking aloud on Sunday afternoon and pondering how I will relay the painful message to our employees on Monday that we will be laying them off as a result of KRA’s closure,” she said.
Keroche was shut down last week after failing to honour tax repayment plan with KRA. The agreement Keroche has breached had been agreed at and signed on March 14, 2022. In the agreement, Keroche agreed to pay Sh. 957 million to the tax authority in a period of 24 months starting January 2022.
According to Ms. Karanja, the business is unable to honour the tax repayment plan it entered into with KRA and needs a restructuring of the payment plan. Ms. Karanja says that Keroche had been pressured into the repayment plan which it is now unable to keep up with.
“I specifically request once more to be given a moratorium on the enforcement action that shut down our operations, and on the unsustainable payment plan that we agreed to under unbearable pressure,” Ms. Karanja said.
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“I therefore also humbly request for further engagement to consider a way for the company to meet its due obligations without sacrificing it and the livelihoods of countless Kenyan households.”
As part of the agreement that the brewer has breached, KRA lifted all the notices it had instituted against Keroche with 36 banks. Agency Notices are commonly issued by KRA to banks holding deposits on behalf of a tax payer and result in the bank freezing such funds. These agency notices had crippled Keroche’s ability to run its operations.