Ugandan tycoon Patrick Bitature loses a $256,000 case over two buildings he never built

Uganda's High Court has ordered Patrick Bitature to pay a South African consultancy $256,136, about 954 million shillings, for design work on two Kampala projects he commissioned in 2012 and never built.

Justice Stephen Mubiru delivered the judgment electronically on Aug. 18 in Finicon (U) Limited v Patrick Bitature. The award carries 9% interest running from 2014, along with value added tax and legal costs, which takes the real bill past a billion shillings. Red Pepper published images of the designs on Sept. 26.

The projects were both in Kololo, the wealthy hillside suburb of Kampala. One was a boutique hotel on Summit View Road. The other was a redesign of Bitature's own house on Malcolm-X Road. Finicon was hired to do the architecture, the engineering and the project management on both, for 5% of the construction cost of each, under an agreement dated July 6, 2012 for the hotel.

Neither building went up, which is where the fight started. The question the court had to answer was whether a consultant gets paid for work on something that was never constructed.

It found that Finicon had done most of the job. The hotel had reached what the industry calls Stage G, the bills of quantities, meaning the materials and costs had been itemised. The house had reached Stage H, tender action, meaning it was ready to go out to contractors.

Bitature's defence was that the projects barely got past inception and that he owed almost nothing. His own paperwork contradicted him. Justice Mubiru found he had signed an application to the Kampala Capital City Authority that allowed the plans to proceed, and that his personal assistants had received and acknowledged the drawings without objection.

The $23,538 he had already paid did not rescue him either. To count as a full and final settlement, the judge said, a part payment has to be offered and accepted as a compromise of the whole dispute. No such agreement existed, so the court treated the money as a partial payment.

Bitature founded the Simba Group and runs it as chairman and group chief executive. He started Simba Telecom in 1998, owns the Protea Hotel Kampala and the Protea Hotel Kampala Marriott Skyz, chaired the Uganda Investment Authority until he stepped down in 2013, and became chairman of Bolloré Transport and Logistics in Uganda in 2021.

He has spent years in court. Bitature has been locked in a dispute with the South African lender Vantage Mezzanine Fund II over a $10 million facility that Simba Properties Investment Company took in 2014, which grew into a $26 million claim and produced criminal proceedings over the alleged alteration of shareholdings in companies pledged as collateral. A separate 2024 judgment went against him over a consent order he had signed as guarantor of Electro-Maxx.

The Finicon ruling turns on something smaller and harder to argue with. He asked for the drawings, his office took delivery of them, and the court decided that settled it.