Narendra Raval built Kenya's biggest cement and steel empire but tax battles and political scrutiny are testing his limits

Narendra Raval arrived in Kenya in 1978 as a teenage temple assistant from Gujarat with no money and no connections. He left the temple in 1982 to work in a steel mill. When that factory closed in 1990, he borrowed money, opened a small hardware shop in Nairobi's Gikomba Market with his wife, and started rolling steel in Athi River two years later. Today, Devki Group generates more than $1 billion in annual revenues, employs 14,000 people, and controls the largest shares of Kenya's steel and cement markets. The story of how Raval built that empire is one of the most remarkable in East African business history. The story of where it stands now is considerably more complicated.

The tax bills came first. In late 2023, the Kenya Revenue Authority presented Devki Steel Mills and Cemtech Limited with demands totalling approximately KSh 4 billion, comprising KSh 3.48 billion in VAT and import duty arrears and KSh 530 million in penalties and interest. The demands related to tax exemptions that the National Treasury had granted to the two companies between 2015 and 2023 on imported machinery and equipment. The Treasury subsequently reversed those exemptions, arguing they had been issued without legal authority. Devki took the fight to the Mombasa High Court, arguing that the exemptions were valid approvals the government had given in writing and that reversing them four years after the fact was unlawful and contrary to constitutional guarantees of fair administrative action. By February 2026, Devki Steel Mills was pursuing alternative dispute resolution with the KRA on a KSh 1.6 billion VAT component of the claim.

The cement division had its own regulatory problems. In 2020, National Cement, Devki's cement subsidiary, was allowed to pay a mining levy of KSh 100 per tonne rather than the standard KSh 140, a concession the Auditor-General Nancy Gathungu later flagged as lacking legal backing and granting unfair advantage to one company in a competitive sector. Parliament adopted a report directing uniform levies across the cement sector. By mid-2025, the concession had been revoked. National Cement now pays a higher rate and faced demands for KSh 193.2 million in back levies for production between July 2020 and March 2022.

The competition regulator added its own judgment in July 2025. The Competition Tribunal upheld findings that nine steel manufacturers, including Devki Steel Mills, had colluded through WhatsApp and other channels to fix prices and restrict output. Devki was fined KSh 46.3 million as part of a broader KSh 287.9 million penalty across the cartel members. The ruling sent a clear signal to a sector that had grown comfortable with informal coordination among its largest players.

Against this backdrop of legal and regulatory exposure, questions about Raval's political relationships have grown louder. He has publicly declared that President William Ruto, who has attended the launch of multiple Devki facilities and praised Raval as a "good friend" and patriotic investor, should serve for 20 years despite constitutional limits. Ruto appointed Raval to chair the National Lottery in 2023 and the Manufacturing Council. Critics, including opposition voices and market analysts, have drawn comparisons to state capture, suggesting that high import duties that Raval has lobbied for on clinker and steel imports conveniently align with his near-monopoly positions in those markets while disadvantaging competitors. Rai Cement and other rival producers have publicly complained that the regulatory environment has been tilted in Devki's favour.

Raval has pushed back consistently. At the launch of Devki's KSh 11 billion steel plant in Taita Taveta in December 2025, attended by Ruto and senior state officials, he told the gathering that he does not do business with the government and defended the tax exemptions as legitimate applications for relief at a time when pandemic conditions had strained cash flows. "We applied for tax relief because our cash flow doesn't allow us to build the factory," he said. He has also argued that Devki's investment record, including a KSh 45 billion clinker plant in West Pokot and a raw steel plant in Kwale County that uses locally sourced iron ore, demonstrates a businessman who is building industrial capacity Kenya needs rather than extracting rents from a captured regulatory system.

The facts of the expansion are not in dispute. Devki Group has invested billions in facilities across Kenya, Uganda and Rwanda, where it acquired cement producer Cimerwa Plc for $85 million in early 2024, adding the leading cement manufacturer in Rwanda to a portfolio that already covered steel, cement, roofing sheets, minerals, packaging, aviation services and energy. By 2026, its regional operations extended into Burundi and the Democratic Republic of Congo through exports, and the group maintained a stated target of employing 30,000 people by 2030. Annual group turnover above $1 billion across its combined operations makes it one of the largest privately owned industrial conglomerates in East Africa.

What the legal and regulatory battles of 2024 and 2025 have done is complicate the telling of that success story. Raval, popularly known as Guru for his temple background and his reputation for teaching business principles to those around him, has spent 34 years building an industrial colossus from next to nothing. The question the current moment poses is not whether what he built is real but whether the terms on which parts of it were built will survive judicial and regulatory scrutiny at a time when the political environment that sustained some of those terms has itself become a source of controversy rather than protection.