Kenyan cement tycoon Benson Ndeta won his fraud case and his old partners are appealing

Benson Ndeta got his criminal prosecution thrown out this month. His former business partners are trying to bring it back.

Savannah Heights Limited and the businessman John Gachanga Kaiganaine filed a notice of appeal against the whole of a High Court judgment delivered on Sept. 7, which declared Ndeta's prosecution unlawful, null and void, and barred any further proceedings arising from the disputed loan and the corporate transactions around it.

The case concerns $35 million, about 4.5 billion shillings, that Absa Bank Kenya advanced between February 2017 and January 2018.

Prosecutors alleged that Ndeta and his co-accused Charles Hills Jr presented themselves to the bank as acting for Savannah Cement, and used forged corporate guarantees, indemnities and extracts of board minutes to obtain the facility. The charge sheet carried twelve counts between them, including conspiracy to commit fraud, obtaining credit by false pretences, forgery and uttering forged documents.

Ndeta was chairman of Savannah Cement at the time. He has denied everything.

What makes the appeal awkward is who is bringing it. Ndeta, Kaiganaine and the businessman Donald Kiboro Mwaura were all directors of Savannah Heights, which was a major shareholder in Savannah Cement, and the dispute started among them rather than at the bank.

It goes back to 2016, when Ndeta acquired additional Savannah Cement shares through a vehicle called Seruji Limited. That transaction produced a sequence of legal battles and eventually investigations into whether the documents used to secure the Absa facility were genuine.

Ndeta's lawyers have argued throughout that he was not acting alone, noting that the court accepted other directors including Mwaura and Kaiganaine took part in approving the loan.

The company at the centre of it no longer operates. Savannah Cement was placed under administration in November 2022 with debts above 14 billion shillings, after KCB and Absa moved on an unpaid facility. Flour milling interests bought what was left of it in a 3.8 billion shilling deal last month.

Ndeta had already left to found Savannah Clinker, registered in 2019, and used it to make a bid that would have changed the Kenyan cement market.

Savannah Clinker offered 27.7 billion shillings for Bamburi Cement in 2023, at 76.55 shillings a share, outbidding Tanzania's Amsons Industries. The offer collapsed once the fraud investigation surfaced and Savannah Clinker withdrew. Amsons bought Bamburi in December 2024 for 23.9 billion shillings and now controls roughly 31% of Kenyan cement capacity through it and East African Portland.

The litigation has moved in every direction since. A magistrate issued arrest warrants for Ndeta and Hills in March after they failed to appear to plead. A court dismissed one of Ndeta's constitutional petitions in December 2025, finding the Director of Public Prosecutions had acted lawfully with no evidence of abuse or bad faith. The High Court ordered a review of the proceedings in March.

Then it stopped the prosecution entirely this month.

Ndeta's former partners now want the Court of Appeal to reverse that, which would put a man once positioned to buy Kenya's largest cement producer back in the dock.