Ajay Shah, the founder of collapsed Trust Bank Limited is the perfect conman.
The guy has managed to elude the Kenyan justice system with impeccable conman’s prowess.
The Indian man who funded bigwigs in KANU era and was close to former President Daniel Arap Moi got his Kenyan citizenship through the influence of the former politician Kariuki Chotara, after about 5 years of being in the country, the Daily Nation reports. That is not a mean feat, this man Ajay Sha was well connected.
He went on to found his own bank where depositors lost a lot of money through Ajay’s own makings. In short he scummed Kenyans off their little money, like all Indian in Kenya do. They come to these shows with a few coins, then go on to use their skin-color to lie to dumb Africans and get away with it.
Anyways, under Shah, Trust Bank was put under statutory management by the Central Bank on September 18, 1998 and it went down with billions of depositors’ money.
‘What happened might never be known and the Court of Appeal has rendered its view on this matter. We also don’t know who is to blame, and we might never know’, argues journalist John Kamau.
This is how they defrauded clients using Trust Bank Limited
On May 30, 2013 when High Court Judge Eric Ogola found the two former executive directors of Trust Bank — Shah and Praful Shah (Co-founder of Trust Bank) together with one Nitin Chandaria— “guilty of misfeasance and breach of trust” and ordered to pay Ksh1.5 billion to the then Deposit Protection Fund “being the amount due in the account of Trust Capital Services Limited”, a company the two controlled.
That time, Justice Ogolla also ruled that the Sh1.5 billion fine continues to attract interest rate at the prevailing interest rate till it is paid in full.
It was reported then (in 2013) that at the commercial bank rate of 17 per cent, some Sh760 million have since accumulated in interest charges since March 2010 plus the Sh1.5 billion pushing up the total to Sh2.36 billion.
In 2014, the two Shah’s fled the country.
They two were found guilty of overdrawing Ksh241 million from their own bank using Trust Capital Services Limited “without proper security”.
The judge had established that, at the time the bank was wound up, its business was carried out with the intent to defraud creditors and for other fraudulent purposes, and that the two former directors were parties to the scheme.
According to the liquidator, Trust Bank lost Sh241,442,376 within a span of seven days in September 1998 (the year the Central Bank put it under statutory management), through an account not registered in the bank but which was being operated by Shah and Praful.
This is the mother of all cons, banks don’t allow this. should not allow this.
Seven days is all it took to scan a lot of Kenyans, collapse a bank and walk away with the loot scot-free.
A Case
Let’s start again, recently that case by the Trust Bank suing Ajay Shah for defrauding it was thrown out after 18 years.
Shah had also sued the liquidator, Deposit Protection Fund for tarnishing his name because he wasn’t found guilty.
The reason for that is because, the judge argued ‘the Sh241 million — said to have been overdrawn without security — “was never lost or stolen … Deposit Protection Fund Board bore the legal and evidential burden to prove loss of Sh241,442,375.80 but did not discharge it.”
Cat with nine lives
Last month, another of the pending Shah case was also dismissed. It was an interesting case that was badly crafted — perhaps deliberately.
In the case, Trust Bank Ltd had sought to recover $2,693,258 and Sh266,888,741 plus compound interest, general damages and costs from Shah and three employees of the bank.
It claimed that the four had allegedly embezzled the money through fraudulent schemes.
Ironically, Trust Bank had not sued the company that had taken the money — a loophole that saw the entire case collapse dramatically.
