The National Bank of Kenya is set to pay a former Member of Parliament Sh. 2.28 billion for unlawfully auctioning his land fourteen years ago.
The payment will be made after the Court of Appeal found that the auction of the 15,994.5 acres in Taita Taveta belonging to former Taveta MP Basil Criticos in September 2007 was undervalued.
Apparently, the land also had buildings, sisal, quarry, and road network which the bank ignored when selling off.
Astonishingly, this reward will be twice the amount of net income of Sh. 1.1 billion that National Bank recorded in the year ended December 2021. In addition to this award, National Bank will also pay the ex MP Sh.35 million which was the surplus from the sale.
The land was sold to the Settlement Fund Trustees (SFT) to recover a loan of Sh. 20 million which had been advanced to a company in which Criticos was a director and a shareholder.
Criticos had acted as a guarantor and the bank sold the land after he defaulted on repayment.
“In the result, subject to what we shall shortly state with regard to the crops, we find the appellant’s valuation report to be solid in content and uncontroverted. It was not to be merely wished away. And we are on balance persuaded by the appellant’s contention that the suit property was sold at an undervalue,” Justices Roselyn Nambuye, Wanjiru Karanja and Patrick Kiage ruled.
The judges also ruled that National bank had acted maliciously and in haste when it auctioned off the land. The bank had charged the former MP excessive interest rates, declined his offers to redeem the debt and sold his property at less than the amount he offered.
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“Our foregoing analysis leads to the inescapable conclusion that the appellant was treated by the respondents in a shabby and wholly unacceptable, if not tyrannous, the manner in the entire transaction,” the judges ruled.
