UK To Name Kenyans Who Have Stashed Stolen Abroad

The outgoing British High Commissioner to Kenya, Nic Hailey has said that the United Kingdom government has a list of the most corrupt people in Kenya.

To that effect, the UK government intends to watch individuals who steal public resources keenly by freezing the corrupt individual’s assets and deny them future travel visas.

According to him, the UK has a team of investigators and prosecutors from the UK working tirelessly to track the stolen assets.

“We already have a team of specialists and we have been trying to investigate these corrupt people. Very soon, we shall find them and bring them to book,” he said.

He, however, said he was not in a position to mention the names for the individuals as the UK, together with the Kenyan authorities working on this matter want to be really ready with evidence of where stolen money and assets are stored in the UK.

“We obviously cannot start talking about these people right now but one thing I can say for sure is that we are pretty close to hunting them down and we have evidence,” he added.

The UK government, through the outgoing high commissioner, has also made it clear that any Kenyan leader charged with corruption offenses risks not getting travel visas to the UK.

“Denial of visas is one of our strategies to seek to help people to book, who transfer their stolen cash into jurisdictions beyond Kenya’s investigation agencies,” he said.

The High Commissioner also said that as much as the UK is willing to help Kenya fight corruption and curb stolen money practice in Kenya, it will highly depend on the willingness of Kenya to stop this practice.

The UK had a corruption repatriation agreement with Kenya in August 2018 when the former British Prime Minister Theresa May visited the country.

It was said that all assets stashed illegally by corrupt Kenyans in the UK would be returned and used in other specific sectors of Kenya’s economy such as the building of schools and hospitals and stocking them with appropriate equipment.

The UK joined Switzerland and Jersey Island in making the corruption repatriation agreement and has been working with the Kenyan government to enforce the law by coordinating investigations that reach beyond Kenyan borders.

Kenya has been witnessing a lot of money and public resources being swindled and not accounted for, the most recent being the Kimwarer-Arror dams saga.

According to the global graft watchdog Transparency International, Kenya is ranked at position 144 out of 180 polled countries whose public sector corruption is on the higher side by 2018.