In a case that has exposed the underbelly of banking confidentiality in Kenya, Kenya Insights reports that four years into a lawsuit Absa Bank Kenya insists never should have existed, the lender’s own former regional executive has told a Mombasa court something no cross-examination has managed to shake loose: that when the bank’s internal investigators found what he considered clear evidence of a client-confidentiality breach, management’s stated concern was not whether the leak happened but whether admitting it would cost the bank money.
That single exchange, buried inside a witness statement now formally adopted as evidence, is the quiet detonator at the centre of New Mega Africa Limited’s Sh1,512,533,679 claim against one of Kenya’s largest banking groups.
The Sh86 Million Loan That Became a Sh1.5 Billion Liability
The dispute traces back to a seemingly straightforward banking relationship. New Mega Africa, a company that hauls clinker by road from Kenyan quarries to cement plants in Tororo, Uganda, had drawn roughly Sh86.4 million in Absa credit facilities by late 2022: term loans, invoice discounting, an overdraft, and guarantees secured against a prime property in Kitisuru, Nairobi.
Court filings describe a banking relationship that soured when Covid-era payment delays from the firm’s key client strained its cash flow, pushing the company to seek a restructuring of its facilities.
What happened next became the crux of the case. New Mega Africa’s director alleges that in July 2021, a relationship manager inside Absa printed the company’s confidential account statements and disclosed its financial distress to outsiders including business associates who were warned off dealing with the firm entirely.
Insurance was reportedly cancelled. Financiers backed away. Trucks were grounded. The firm that had once been a strong-performing customer found its credit lines effectively poisoned by its own bank.
When Absa failed to file a defence within the required window, the High Court in Mombasa entered interlocutory judgment in November 2022, finding the bank had breached its fiduciary and contractual duty to its client and awarding
New Mega Africa the full Sh1.5 billion it sought a figure roughly seventeen times the size of the original loan.
The Manager, The Phone Call, and The KeNHA Connection
The most granular account of what allegedly happened inside Absa comes from Evans Murumba, the bank’s former Coast Region sector head for business banking, who resigned in mid-2022 to pursue politics and has since testified for New Mega Africa.
According to his witness statement, the disclosure traces to a single phone call: relationship manager Wycliffe Makori allegedly telephoned Jared Makori, then a regional manager at the Kenya National Highways Authority, to warn him against entering into financial dealings with New Mega Africa disclosing that the firm was in distress and that the bank was weighing recalling its facilities and auctioning its security.
Jared Makori, called to testify himself, confirmed the conversation took place, though he said he had no recording of it and denied any business interest in New Mega Africa beyond knowing its director.
Murumba’s account goes further: when he confronted Wycliffe Makori, the relationship manager admitted making the call.
Murumba escalated the matter internally for investigation and possible discipline.
The Moment That Defined the Case
It is what happened after that escalation that gives the case its sharpest edge. Murumba testified that the bank’s internal review concluded there was no material risk arising from the disclosure and recommended no further action but that he was separately cautioned that formally admitting the breach to the client, or disciplining the staff involved, would amount to Absa conceding liability.
In other words, the concern inside the bank, as Murumba describes it, was not principally about whether client confidentiality had been violated, but about the legal exposure that acknowledging it would create.
“When I summoned Mr Wycliffe Makori to explain himself, the relationship manager admitted making the call,” Murumba said in his witness statement.
“The actions by Mr Wycliffe Makori were, in my view, not in good faith and amounted to utter misconduct. When reviewed alongside his reluctance to hand over the client relationship, I found it deeply disturbing because it amounted to a blatant breach of client confidentiality, duty of care and data protection laws, mainly intended to cause panic and reputational damage to the client among its business associates”.
The “Schoolmates” Defence
Absa’s account of Wycliffe Makori’s conduct rests on more than a denial that the disputed phone call happened. In sworn evidence, Makori has framed his personal financial dealings with Abai Omusala the M-Pesa transfers between the two men that New Mega Africa’s side has pointed to as evidence of an improperly close relationship as nothing more than the ordinary back-and-forth of old friends.
The two men, the bank’s evidence suggests, were schoolmates long before Absa entered the picture, and the transfers were personal loans and repayments unrelated to the bank’s handling of the account.
It is a defence built to neutralise one line of attack, but it opens another. If Makori and Abai Omusala’s relationship long predates the banking facility, and by the bank’s own telling was cordial enough to involve personal money changing hands between them, that only sharpens the question New Mega Africa’s lawyers have yet to fully answer: what, then, explains a relationship manager allegedly moving within an hour of reassuring his friend face-to-face to warn a third party off doing business with that same friend’s company?
The Witness the Bank Fought to Silence
Murumba’s evidence very nearly never reached the court at all. He first sought to join the suit as a party in his own right a bid the court declined before applying to testify purely as a witness, framing his involvement as necessary to clear his name over the handling of the New Mega Africa relationship during his tenure.
Absa opposed his admission vigorously, telling the court his testimony would only “murk the waters” and serve as a proxy for the plaintiff’s case.
One judge had previously dismissed Murumba’s application, observing that the witness was “not introducing any new evidence” and was “not a necessary addition” to the case.
But in a ruling delivered on 22 January 2025, Justice Julius Ng’arng’ar allowed a review application and reversed the earlier decision, permitting Murumba to file his statement and take the stand after all reopening an evidentiary door Absa had spent roughly eighteen months trying to keep shut .Justice Ng’arng’ar found that the application for review was “not an abuse of the process of court” and allowed the transport firm’s notice of motion.
Then, Days After the Reopening:
The Bank’s Own Witness Walks Away
What has drawn less attention is what happened to Absa’s side of the witness list once Murumba’s testimony was back in play.Sophie Omondi, the relationship manager who took over New Mega Africa’s account and was present at the internal meeting Murumba describes, has formally withdrawn as an intended witness for the bank.
In a letter copied to all parties and the court, she said the litigation had taken a toll on her personal life and that she wished to move on a withdrawal she extended to a related case involving the same parties pending before a Nairobi court.
Taken alone, a witness stepping back for personal reasons is unremarkable.
Taken alongside the timeline Omondi was in the room for the disputed meeting Murumba describes, and her exit follows directly on the heels of his reinstated testimony it leaves Absa’s account of events resting on progressively fewer first-hand voices, at precisely the moment New Mega Africa is moving to put a hard number on its losses.
What Is Actually on Trial
Kenyan banks hold some of the most sensitive financial data in the country, protected by a duty of confidentiality regulators and courts increasingly treat as inseparable from the Data Protection Act’s civil exposure.
If New Mega Africa’s account survives full cross-examination and if its auditor’s report lands where the company expects, the case could become one of the costliest data-confidentiality judgments in Kenyan banking history and a precedent-setting warning that the price of a single unauthorised phone call can run into the billions.
Absa, for its part, has not wavered publicly. Through its filings the bank maintains that no leak occurred, that internal investigations found no wrongdoing by any employee, and that the suit is a calculated manoeuvre by a borrower seeking to escape a legitimate Sh86.4 million debt rather than a genuine data-protection grievance.
That defence will now be tested against a former insider’s sworn account of an internal culture that, on his telling, treated a confirmed disclosure less as a compliance failure to fix than a liability to manage.
The case continues before the High Court’s Commercial and Admiralty division in Mombasa.
Absa Bank Kenya did not respond to a request for comment on Murumba’s account of the internal caution against admitting liability by the time of publication.
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