KENYA:KENYA'S PRIME minister summoned cabinet colleagues yesterday to look at the secretive sale of a luxury hotel at what critics say was a knockdown price while protesters demanded the finance minister be fired over the deal.
The Grand Regency deal has stoked national outrage and fuelled tensions in an already fragile coalition government set up in April to end a post-election crisis.
"Kimunya must go!" chanted scores of marching demonstrators, referring to finance minister Amos Kimunya. About 10 legislators were among the 100 or so protesters who marched from the hotel in what organisers said was the first in a series of planned demonstrations in Nairobi.
The hotel deal, involving Libyan investors, has added to suspicions of continued large-scale corruption after a series of scandals in east Africa's biggest economy, which foreign businesses routinely cite as a deterrent to investment.
The saga has pitted mainly ministers from Mr Odinga's Orange Democratic Movement against Mr Kimunya, a loyal ally of president Mwai Kibaki. Mr Kimunya has been finance minister for most of Mr Kibaki's rule since 2003, a time of strong growth.
Although having previously said the government-owned hotel had not been sold, Mr Kimunya last week said it had sold for 2.9 billion shillings (€28 million) after an offer "too sweet" to refuse.
That price, less than the 4 billion shillings of a 1994 sale price for the hotel which analysts value now at between 4.5 and 6 billion shillings, provoked outrage around Kenya, including from some of Mr Kimunya's cabinet colleagues and anti-graft watchdogs.
The minister says the deal was proper and fetched the best possible price for the nation. His defenders say critics are mounting a witch-hunt before examining details of the deal.
Late on Monday, cabinet colleague and lands minister James Orengo produced transaction documents that he said showed the hotel had in fact been sold for just 1.85 billion shillings.
Mr Orengo said Central Bank governor Njuguna Ndung'u had signed the agreement, and the hotel had gone to a company known as "Libyan African Pan African Investment Company Kenya Limited with both Libyan and Kenyan directors.
Mr Kibaki and Mr Odinga were at bitter loggerheads for the first two months of 2008, after Mr Odinga accused Mr Kibaki of stealing the December presidential election through fraud.
But via international mediation, they buried their differences to form a coalition government that has brought peace back to Kenya. Mr Odinga called a meeting of cabinet's finance committee yesterday to discuss the Regency affair.
The Regency had been owned by a Kenyan tycoon accused of being the architect of the so-called Goldenberg scandal that nearly sunk Kenya's economy in the 1990s.
Kamlesh Pattni, who has been tried but never convicted despite multiple inquiries into the siphoning of some $1 billion (€633 million) of public funds over bogus diamond and gold exports, handed the five-star, multi-storey hotel to the bank earlier this year. Local media said that won him immunity from prosecution. - (Reuters)