Corporate Brief’s

Barclays
The whole saga of the Matiba schools vs. Barclays is spinning out of control. Current MP’s and former MP’s have stepped up and urged the government to tame rogue foreign banks that are destroying Kenya entrepreneurs. Meanwhile, over the weekend, threats were made to Barclays and staff working for the receiver manager of the schools. Hopefully these are just prank calls.

HFCK
Al is well or not well with Housing Finance’s proposed merger with Development bank (DBK) .It appears that, not only is DBK management opposed to the deal, but also Central Bank of Kenya which now also wants to remove the managers of HFCK

Central Bank
Meanwhile deputy governor Sambili’s term is coming to an end. The office comes with security of tenure.

Econet
According to Ministry of Information PS, James Rege, Econet will not be allowed to operate in Kenya because it has only paid $15 million of the $27 million license fee. This was on KTN, but after attending a few functions and seeing some wild news coverage, I’d like to see the actual remarks, and the context in which he made them.

Telkom
Telkom will lay off 12,000 of its 18,000 workers. This will save 400 million shillings a month – Telkom earns 1.2 billion shillings a month, but half of that goes to salaries (according to media reports on Monday). The company has about 250,000 lines, and according to PS Rege, a Senegalese telephone operator serves the same number of lines with just 2,000 employees.