Businessman who robbed Imperial Bank of Sh34 billion only had two friends and hardly spent any money

The first time Abdulmalek Janmohammed ever ‘robbed’ Imperial Bank, he had a gun to his head. That was in 1998.

Four years later, he became the robber, carrying out a heist so elaborate, its web is still being untangled, one and a half years after his death in September 2015.

For a man who orchestrated the theft of Sh34 billion, one of the biggest and most elaborate bank heists in Kenyan history, little is known of Abdulmalek Janmohammed — who at 56 still lived with his mother in Riverside Drive, Nairobi.

If you do a Google image search of the man with a protruding, pesky potbelly and a double chin, you will only find five images. Indeed, it is hard, even now, to find any single person who can draw a complete image of the man.

Instead, everyone who knew or worked for him knew only a part of the man, the part he permitted them to see. Abdulmalek, who drew Sh5 million from his account every month, was obsessively private and kept a small circle of friends, most of whom would become cogs in his secret plans for the bank he headed as he gradually turned its tagline “Looking after your interest” into something else.

See, Abdulmalek was always a rule-breaker, eager to quietly test the limits and see how much he could get away with. Since he was unassuming and exceedingly introverted, most of his experiments were with unsuspecting people. Emails presented to the Central Bank of Kenya (CBK) by FTI, an auditing firm, as part of the evidence in the fraud, include one on a trove of his conversations, pointing towards a quiet, manipulative leader.

For Abdulmalek Janmohammed, people could be controlled in one of three ways. The first one was the easiest, using money. Everyone who worked for him directly earned a healthy salary and, if he liked them, random cash gifts. His gifts, even at the mosque and within his community, were always in cash. The in-house joke at the bank was that it was probably the only place in Kenya where the secretary, Anne Mboya, drove a better car than her boss.

He owned a Mitsubishi Lancer and a Mitsubishi Gallant, modest cars for a man of his means. When, in 2011 Simba Colt began selling BMW vehicles, he bought a BMW 5 Series that he never drove. Anne, on the other hand, drove to work in her Mercedes. She had worked for him from 1996, three years after Imperial Bank opened.

Abdulmalek’s second tool was a combination of intimidation and compartmentalisation. He called in the police on anyone, even once on a residential committee for trying to force him to follow the association’s rules. Everyone and everything around him worked in silos, such that he was the only one with a complete picture.

His third tool was the most ingenious, loaded free reign. When his former executives broke down the scandal to the board, and in turn to the world, a lot of things made sense. If you worked for him, you could do whatever you wanted. But there was a catch that you only had this free reign if you did exactly what he wanted, when he wanted it done.

This would include handwritten chits asking for money to be transferred to particular accounts. Entries would be hidden by manipulating the accounting software, allowing for Abdulmalek to produce three different books of accounts. He had the real one showing the missing money. The board of Imperial Bank got one, and CBK, as the regulator, the third. Abdulmalek Janmohammed knew that the best way to rob a bank was to run one.

Reprinted with permission from owaahh.com.

The third and last part of these series will be featured next week.