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No, Kenya’s Weekly Citizen didn’t report money laundering at KCB bank

“In damning documents seen by the Citizen, KCB Joshua Oigara and powerful lawyer Adil Khawaja may have helped Deputy President William Ruto, launder over 2 billion shillings in just one year,” claims a message posted on the Facebook page “Citizen Weekly” on 21 September 2020.

Joshua Oigara is the chief executive of Kenya Commercial Bank, or KCB.

The claim is repeated in two other Facebook messages, posted the same day. As proof, the posts all include three official-looking documents, one seemingly a letter from Oigara.

Weekly Citizen is a well-known Kenyan newspaper, and the “Citizen Weekly” Facebook page uses the paper’s masthead as its cover and profile photos.

Did the newspaper report that KCB bank had helped launder KSh2 billion for Ruto? We checked.



‘Disassociate our publication from impersonators’


Citizen Weekly” is an imposter page. Weekly Citizen’s real Facebook page is “Weekly Citizen Newspaper”.

The real page was created on 24 June 2014 and links to the newspaper’s website, weeklycitizen.co.ke. The imposter page was created on 14 August 2018 and links to citizenweekly.org, a website that is still under construction.

On 21 September 2020 the Weekly Citizen warned about the imposter page in an article headlined “Disclaimer: FAKE FACEBOOK PAGE”.

“Our attention has been drawn to the fact that some unscrupulous people out to malign the name of our respected Weekly Citizen Newspaper have hosted a fake Facebook page pretending to be that of the official Weekly Citizen,” the article reads.

“We take this earliest opportunity to disassociate our esteemed publication from these impersonators. Our official Facebook page is Weekly Citizen Newspaper.

“The fake Facebook page purporting to be our official one has adversely soiled the name of Kenya Commercial Bank, Kenya’s leading banking institution, for their own ulterior motive to puncture the good reputation of KCB.”

Fake documents


The documents posted by the imposter page are also fake.

The letter, for example, gives the postal address of Kenya’s regulating central bank as “P.O. Box 6000-00200”. But the central bank’s correct address is “P.O. Box 60000-00200”. It is unlikely that a commercial bank would get the regulator’s address wrong in official communication.

Another document redacts the relevant account number – which the bank would be unlikely to do in a “confidential” communication with the central bank. Also unlikely is the omission of the account’s branch information.

KCB has issued a press statement disassociating itself from the claim, which it terms “blatantly false” and “fashioned to injure the reputation of the bank and its leadership”. – Dancan Bwire

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