The High Court has upheld a Capital Markets Authority (CMA) order requiring stockbroker Suntra Investments to restore 212,500 Safaricom shares. The shares were wrongly allocated to two individuals about 18 years ago, during Safaricom’s 2008 initial public offering. The ruling was reported on November 11, 2026.
Suntra was one of the authorised selling agents for the 2008 Safaricom IPO. It received funds from banks, including KCB, to buy shares on behalf of their clients, and forwarded application batches to Citibank, which handled the transactions. Some of those applications were never fulfilled, and the dispute has run for nearly two decades.
The best-known case involves Ugandan businessman Sudhir Ruparelia. Documents reported by The Standard show that he applied for shares worth Sh116.5 million, equal to 23.3 million shares, but never received them. Suntra was ordered by the High Court in 2014 to refund KCB Sh24.5 million after the IPO, and it has since fought to recover money from Citibank.
Suntra says Citibank reconciled the applications and obtained a discharge in 2008, and that the matter was reopened only in 2019. The stockbroker has contested that account. Its efforts to obtain information have also been tied up in litigation, including an enforcement application over a 2022 Commission on Administrative Justice order requiring Citibank to disclose information.
The High Court’s latest ruling deals with a different question: the 212,500 shares that were wrongly allocated to two individuals.Reports show that the court upheld the CMA’s order that Suntra restore those shares. The court’s reasoning and the identities of the two individuals were not available in the report reviewed for this article.
The decision matters for the integrity of the share register. Allocation errors in a major public offering can give holders a stake they were never entitled to, and regulators must be able to correct them. The CMA’s ability to enforce such orders is also a test of its authority over licensed intermediaries.
The case also shows how long the costs of errors from an IPO can last. Nearly 18 years after the offering, the parties are still disputing the allocation of the shares and the money involved. Investors and intermediaries will watch how the restoration is carried out.
The Safaricom shareholding has attracted court scrutiny this year for other reasons. Separate litigation over the government’s 15 percent stake sale has produced conflicting court decisions, including a High Court ruling in September 2026 that declared the sale null and void. Those cases concern a different transaction from the one at issue in the Suntra ruling.
The next signals will be the timetable for restoring the shares, any appeal by Suntra or the affected individuals, and the CMA’s response. Those steps will show how quickly the regulator can enforce allocation orders from a decades-old public offering.
