WARNING: This is Version 1 of my old archive, so Photos will NOT work and many links will NOT work. But you can find articles by searching on the Titles. There is a lot of information in this archive. Use the SEARCH BAR at the top right. Prior to December 2012; I was a pro-Christian type of Conservative. I was unaware of the mass of Jewish lies in history, especially the lies regarding WW2 and Hitler. So in here you will find pro-Jewish and pro-Israel material. I was definitely WRONG about the Boeremag and Janusz Walus. They were for real.
Original Post Date: 2010-11-29 Time: 12:00:03 Posted By: News Poster
By John Ngirachu
Nairobi – Allegations of irregular activities at Charterhouse Bank came to the surface in a series of media reports from March 2006, and a perfect storm of adverse publicity on the bank had been created by the middle of that year.
It went on to acquire the infamy of being Kenya’s biggest banking scandal. Former Mandera Central MP Billow Kerrow was the Shadow Finance minister when he tabled in Parliament an interim report by a taskforce on Charterhouse Bank on June 21, 2006.
The documents presented were alleged to have been produced by a taskforce composed of officials from Central Bank of Kenya, the Kenya Revenue Authority and the Kenya Anti-Corruption Commission.
Fearing that depositors and creditors would rush to withdraw from the bank, precipitating its collapse, the Central Bank of Kenya placed it under statutory management on June 23, two days later.
It was closed that afternoon.
The bank’s managing director, Mr Sanjay Shah, rushed to court to block the CBK from acting on the bank.
Mr Shah’s case did not succeed and the appeals and counter-appeals from that suit eventually mushroomed into 26 related cases filed in Nairobi, Eldoret and Kitale.
On June 28, 2006, Parliament directed the Departmental Committee on Finance, Planning, Trade and Tourism to carry out investigations into the bank.
The committee, chaired then by current Finance assistant minister Dr Oburu Oginga, took four months to investigate and at the end recommended the re-opening of the bank.
The report was tabled in the House on October 12 but was never debated and so its recommendations were not adopted.
On July 7, Yatta MP Charles Kilonzo presented a petition to the House on behalf of some 35 depositors whose money is still held up in the bank.
The Departmental Committee on Finance, Trade and Planning has subsequently taken up the matter and has been interviewing officials of a number of government agencies and directors of the bank.
In its presentation to the committee, the Banking Fraud Unit revealed violations of banking laws it had been prepared to arrest and charge the bank’s managers and directors for.
It said the prosecutions were stalled because of the failure of the State Law Office to approve the final charge sheets it had prepared, accusations the latter has denied.
According to the report handed over to the committee, the most consistent violations were the directors’ dealings with the bank beyond what is allowed in law.
But among the more interesting is the fact that the bank’s managers did not report suspicious transactions or activities that may indicate money laundering or attempts to conceal the true identity of customers.
There also existed at least 839 accounts for which the bank could not produce account-opening documents and which had, in some cases, transactions of large amounts of money.
The United States government has, through its ambassador to Kenya, Mr Michael Ranneberger, put pressure on the Kenyan government not to allow the reopening of the bank.
The ambassador has, in letters to senior government officials, charged that the owners, managers and some of its account holders and their business associates were believed to be involved in narcotics trafficking, smuggling, money laundering and tax evasion worth about Sh40 billion shillings from approximately 2001-2006.
“Were it to reopen, the message to the financial community would be clear – Kenya’s financial regulatory environment is uncertain and fraud, corruption and worse go unpunished,” he wrote in a letter dated January 25, 2010.
Original Source: 
Original date published: 27 November 2010
Source: http://allafrica.com/stories/201011290921.html?viewall=1