Crime & Investigations

Inside the wood-panelled courtroom of Milimani Law Courts, an international gold trader did what almost no victim of Nairobi’s foreign-investor fraud economy dares to do: he sat before Principal Magistrate P.K. Mutai and pointed, under oath, at a practising advocate.

Andrew Adel Gaballa, director of Dubai-registered Sakina Commodities FZCO, told the court he was introduced to Conrad Anangwe Maloba on the 15th floor of the Global Trade Centre, in the polished suite occupied by Conrad Law Advocates LLP.

It was there, Gaballa says, that the paperwork was produced that convinced him this was a real transaction: a Sales and Purchase Agreement for 600 kilograms of gold dore bars, a collateral management arrangement, and a formal letter engaging the firm for legal services and funds management.

On the strength of those documents, and the simple fact that a licensed Kenyan advocate’s name and letterhead were attached to them, Gaballa authorised two SWIFT transfers from Abu Dhabi Islamic Bank. The total: USD 505,000, roughly Sh65.37 million. USD 10,000 was booked as legal fees. The remaining USD 495,000, the firm later said, was held in trust.

He believed he was buying gold. What he says he got was a meticulously staged fraud with a Nairobi law firm’s trust account sitting at its centre.

The scheme, according to the complaint Gaballa filed with the Directorate of Criminal Investigations on 24 March 2026, did not begin in Nairobi. It began in Dubai in October 2025, where Gaballa was introduced to a man calling himself Marshall Morrison, presenting as an American investor with access to an artisanal gold consignment out of Tanzania. Morrison introduced a Kenyan facilitator, Duncan Okonji Okaka, and the group travelled to Mwanza to inspect what appeared to be operational artisanal mining sites.

The structure of the deal was simple on paper: 600 kilograms of gold, with 10 kilograms held back in Nairobi as collateral while the remaining 590 kilograms shipped to Dubai. Agreements were signed in January 2026. By mid-February, Gaballa was in Nairobi and was shown three boxes said to contain the 10-kilogram collateral, which were then placed in storage at a Nairobi facility.

Then the story shifted, in the way these operations reliably do.

War in the UAE made direct Dubai delivery impossible, the sellers claimed. Reaching the gold would now require rerouting through Oman by private jet, at additional cost. An insurance certificate surfaced from an entity called Arivid Insurance, not a conventional policy. Cryptocurrency transfers were introduced into the payment chain. Then the sellers went quiet, and the gold never arrived.

Investigators later established that Nairobi Air Traffic Control had no record of any private jet departure matching the claimed Oman shipment. The collateral gold in storage has never been subjected to meaningful forensic testing. Duncan Okonji was arrested and charged at Milimani with conspiracy to defraud and obtaining money by false pretences; he was released on bond. The Sh65 million has not been recovered.

What happened to Gaballa personally, after the money vanished, is its own story. As he tried to leave the country, a red alert was placed on his passport the complainant in a fraud case suddenly unable to fly out of the country where he says he was defrauded.

He was held for hours at Jomo Kenyatta International Airport before the Australian Embassy intervened; the alert was not lifted for several days, during which he says he received unexplained late-night phone calls and largely confined himself to his hotel out of fear.

Kenyan authorities have not explained who entered the alert or why it targeted the man who had filed the police complaint rather than anyone accused in it.

Gaballa’s Sh65 million is not the only foreign fortune the DCI says has flowed into Conrad Law Advocates LLP’s Ecobank account this year.

In a parallel case dating to January 2026, prosecutors allege Maloba and unnamed associates induced a Syrian-linked businessman, Talal Yousef Yousef Zaitoun, tied to Swedish-registered timber and machinery interests, to part with USD 470,750 about Sh60.8 million on the promise of a Kenyan government tender for 500 Toyota Hiace High Roof ambulances worth a claimed USD 36 million.

The staging, by the DCI’s own account, was extraordinary in its audacity. Zaitoun was flown in on a Turkish Airlines flight, collected at JKIA, lodged at the Radisson Blu Arboretum, and the next day escorted directly into Harambee House the gazetted seat of the Kenyan presidency where men posing as senior Treasury and Health Ministry officials showed him ambulance-tender documents and demanded a ‘performance bond’ equivalent to three percent of the contract’s value.

Seven suspects were arrested on 10 March 2026 inside a twelfth-floor boardroom at Harambee House itself, in a scheme the DCI says had been running since 10 January that year. At the time of the DCI’s statement, a lawyer believed to have facilitated receipt of the stolen funds connected, investigators said, to Conrad Law Advocates LLP remained at large and was being actively sought.

Two unrelated foreign victims. Two entirely different pretexts one gold, one government ambulances. One law firm’s trust account, receiving both.

Conrad Maloba’s 48 Hours In Cell

The gold case eventually caught up with Maloba personally. On 23 April 2026, he was released from a Nairobi police station after being held for two nights by detectives investigating the fake gold syndicate, without being formally arraigned or charged in court.

Legal observers publicly questioned how a high-profile advocate could be detained that long without charges being filed, with one analyst quoted suggesting that either investigators were sitting on serious evidence or Maloba had ‘bought his freedom’ a remark that captured the unease his release generated in legal circles.

Since then, Maloba has taken the fight to the High Court rather than to a plea. He and his firm have repeatedly sought and secured conservatory orders restraining the DCI and the Director of Public Prosecutions from arresting, charging or prosecuting him or his staff over the Sakina gold matter.

The DPP has opposed these applications as an abuse of process aimed at defeating a lawful investigation. When Maloba was due to take plea on the ambulance-related charges in May, a Kiambu High Court order halted that process too.

Not His First Rodeo With Other People’s Money

Maloba’s courtroom history did not begin with Sakina Commodities or Harambee House ambulances. High Court records from a 2021 civil suit, Conrad Maloba & Associates Advocates v Bashir, Noor & Co. Advocates, show the firm was ordered in 2024 to pay a lump sum of Sh10 million toward a decretal debt, with the balance due in monthly instalments a judgment stemming from a dispute the court had been managing since at least 2023, including consent orders to reserve tens of millions of shillings pending resolution.

In a separate 2022 ruling out of Nanyuki, J M Mwangi & Company Advocates LLP sought to enforce a professional undertaking against Maloba and his then-partner Nick Ndeda over an outstanding balance connected to a Sh1.675 million property transaction the kind of professional undertaking dispute that, in Kenya’s legal fraternity, tends to follow advocates who have a pattern of holding client and third-party money longer, and more loosely, than the rules allow.

Then there is the case of Nazir Bhaduralli Nurmohammad Jinnah, a manager the firm entrusted with significant financial control, including signatory powers over its accounts.

Jinnah was later accused of absconding with firm funds and fleeing to the United Kingdom a claim the firm itself reported to police, even as it separately faced complaints from clients that it owed them money it had not paid out. Jinnah was subsequently spotted, by multiple accounts, very much still living in Nairobi, raising the obvious and still-unanswered question of how a law firm run by a managing partner with his own history of financial controversy allowed a member of staff that level of unsupervised access to its trust accounts in the first place.

The Architecture Of Legitimacy

None of this reads, on paper, like the profile of a street-corner con artist. Maloba presents as a polished commercial advocate. His firm’s marketing speaks the language of private wealth management, international clients and family offices.

The Global Trade Centre address, the Level 15 suite number, the SWIFT wire instructions on law-firm letterhead all of it carries an aura of institutional safety that an ordinary commercial bank account simply does not have for a foreign investor unfamiliar with Nairobi.

That aura, prosecutors now argue in open court, was itself the instrument of the alleged fraud. Gaballa did not hand cash to a street broker.

He wired hundreds of thousands of dollars into accounts controlled by a licensed law firm, after meeting its managing partner face to face in his own office. The documents were drawn. The fees were taken. The collateral was ceremonially produced. Then the gold disappeared, the private jet never left the tarmac, and the money stayed gone.

Ahmednasir’s remark, delivered from within the legal profession itself rather than from an aggrieved foreign investor, lands with a weight that ordinary criticism does not.

It is one thing for a Dubai gold trader or a Swedish exporter’s Syrian-linked associate to say they were fleeced by a Nairobi lawyer. It is another for a senior member of the Kenyan bar to say it in public, on the record, about a sitting colleague.

A Pattern, Not A Coincidence

Strip away the specifics the gold, the ambulances, the boardroom inside Harambee House, the private jet that existed only on paper and what remains is a single, repeating structural fact: foreign money keeps landing in the trust accounts of Conrad Law Advocates LLP, and foreign money keeps disappearing from them.

Twice in three months, according to DCI records and courtroom testimony, unrelated international victims wired six-figure sums into the same firm’s Ecobank account chasing entirely different commodities. Twice, the underlying transaction collapsed the moment the money cleared.

Maloba’s defence in the gold matter is consistent: that Conrad Law Advocates LLP acted strictly as an advocate holding client funds in trust on instruction, that a genuine advocate-client relationship existed, and that no complaint was ever lodged against him with the Advocates Complaints Commission.

He maintains the criminal process is being weaponised to pressure him in what he casts as a commercial dispute rather than a fraud.

That defence has, so far, kept him out of the dock and largely out of custody, shielded by conservatory orders while Duncan Okonji faces the more immediate criminal process in the gold case and the ambulance charges sit stalled in Kiambu.

But it does not explain why a firm holding itself out as a boutique international-transactions practice has now had its trust accounts named in two separate multi-million-shilling foreign fraud schemes within a single quarter, on top of a string of unresolved civil judgments and a staff-embezzlement episode it reported to police itself.

The Question The Profession Cannot Keep Deferring

Gaballa’s testimony this week did more than recount a failed gold deal gone wrong in the way so many failed gold deals do. It put a licensed, practising Nairobi advocate’s own bank statements and office address into evidence in open court, in his own name, as exhibits in a fraud trial.

That is a rare thing in Kenyan legal circles, where professional solidarity and the machinery of conservatory orders usually keep an advocate’s financial conduct out of public view until well after the money is gone and the victim has gone home.

Conrad Anangwe Maloba denies any wrongdoing, and the courts Magistrate Mutai in the gold case, the Kiambu bench in the ambulance matter, and the High Court judges weighing his conservatory applications will ultimately decide whether that denial holds.

What is no longer in serious dispute is the pattern itself: two international frauds, one trust account, and a growing list of Kenyan and foreign creditors who say the same firm owes them money it has not paid.

The rest of the legal profession, and increasingly the rest of the region, is watching to see whether Kenya’s regulators treat that pattern as coincidence for a third time.