Andrew Chege, the man behind Safaritech Limited has declared to the Members of County Assembly (MCAs) of Nairobi, Kenya that he is worth KS1.5 billion (US$10.4 million).
Safaritech Limited is the mother company of Safaritech Ghana Limited, the company that audited MTN Ghana and concluded that between 2014 and 2018, MTN hid 30% of its revenue from government. As result of that audit, MTN was slapped with a back tax of over GHS8.2 billion, but it was eventually scrapped after the dodgy history of Safaritech was exposed.
Chege was nominated by the Governor of Nairobi, Johnson Sakaja for the new position of Nairobi Revenue Authority Chairman, and during his vetting by the MCAs, he made the declaration.
He reportedly told the Budget and Appropriation Committee of the Assembly that his wealth is in the form of money in various bank accounts, as well as assets and shares.
He also informed the MCAs that he gets income from dividends, rental payments, and interest from international firms.
Chege was eventually approved for the role.
Andrew Chege, whose name was listed in Safaritech’s registration documents in London in 2016 as the only person with interest in the company, was a former Kenya Revenue Authority (KRA) director in charge of statistics and data as of 2019. But now he has been nominated to head the newly-created revenue authority just for Nairobi, the capital of Kenya.
Meanwhile, per Ghana Revenue Authority’s recent explanation of its relationship with Safaritech Ghana Limited, it stated that the company was engaged in 2018, with Andrew Chege listed as the director.
At the same time, Andrew Chege was director of another supposed auditing firm registered in Ghana under the name of 192G, which shared the same dodgy Kanda street address with Safaritech Ghana Limited, a location which Techfocus24 discovered was a ladies’ boutique.
It would be recalled that the audit Safaritech did on MTN was reviewed by a renowned globally recognized audit firm – KPMG and it failed that test, as KPGM could not confirm the authenticity of the methodology Safaritech used.
Safaritech also made claims of being a base of IMF, World Bank, UNDP, USAID, GIZ and other major international institutions, but none of those institutions have confirmed any linkage with Safaritech.
Techfocus24 has just learnt that Safaritech has recently been appointed to do similar audit work for Uganda’s revenue authority, and it appears they keep winning revenue assurance contracts across West and East Africa although Andrew Chege listed the Kenya Revenue Authority as his employer as recently as 2019.
A few years back African leaders were led on by a Haitian company called GVG to believe that players in the telecoms industry were hiding revenue from them. As a result, GVG and their cohorts in African governments and state institutions fleeced countries like Ghana of revenue that would have gone to the state without the intervention of GVG. It was nothing more than a create, loot and share machine christened revenue assurance exercise.
In Ghana, after GVG went away, following criminal charges against it Haitian founder and former Prime Minister of that country, Laurent Lamothe, Subah Infosolutions also came to the scene and left, and now Safaritech is also here.
Safaritech has deleted its website from the very day Techfocus24 exposed who they were.
Meanwhile, Techfocus24 has learnt that Safaritech is still around in Ghana and they have done more work than just auditing MTN. GRA is however yet to tell Ghanaians how much Safaritech was paid for the job they supposedly did for the country.
