On a quiet Monday in mid-March 2026, the East African Development Bank decided it was time to clear the air. For days, people across Kenya had been talking about a messy financial dispute involving one of the bank’s borrowers.
Much of the chatter, the bank said, was not true. So they put out a straightforward statement from their headquarters in Kampala, sharing the real timeline based on court records everyone can check.
It all started more than a decade ago, in April 2015. A Kenyan company called Dari Limited signed a loan agreement with the EADB for just over nine million US dollars. Both sides had lawyers at the table, and everyone agreed on the terms.
To back the loan, the company’s shareholders and directors put up several properties they owned in Nairobi. These were officially registered as security for the bank.
The money was released in July 2015, once the paperwork was complete. For a while, things seemed fine. But by the middle of 2016, payments stopped coming. The bank sent reminder letters in November 2017. They were ignored. After trying everything reasonable, the EADB had no choice but to go to court.
The loan papers clearly said any dispute would be handled under English law in the High Court in London.
So that’s where the bank filed its case. In June 2019, the English court ruled in the bank’s favour, ordering Dari Limited to pay more than fifteen million dollars – the original amount plus all the interest and penalties that had grown over time. Kenyan courts later accepted that judgment too: the High Court in Nairobi confirmed it in February 2020, and the Court of Appeal backed it up in April 2023.
Throughout those long seven years of legal steps, the bank says it never once received a realistic or properly documented offer to repay the debt, no matter what some people have claimed in public.
With the courts on its side, the EADB moved forward under the original security agreement. In October 2024, it sold one of the pledged properties along Ngong Road at public auction. Every legal step was followed, the highest bidder won fairly, and – importantly – no court order was in place to stop the sale at the time.
After the auction, Dari Limited went back to court. The company sued the bank and the people who handled the sale, complaining mainly about how the property had been valued. A temporary order was granted, but it could only apply to properties that hadn’t yet been sold. Then, on 9 March 2026, the High Court in Nairobi made its final call: it dismissed the whole case and lifted the temporary orders.
In its statement, the bank steps back from what it describes as a noisy public drama full of twisted facts. It simply wants to stick to the rules everyone signed up for – the original loan agreement, its own clear policies, and the decisions already made by the courts. “There must be finality of court matters,” the statement quietly reminds everyone.
The East African Development Bank has been around since 1967, helping businesses across Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania and Rwanda grow and create jobs. Its job is to support real development in the region, and it handles these situations the same way any responsible lender would – by following the law and protecting the funds that belong to its member countries and partners.
