Names of top Catholic Church priests alleged to have plotted to illegally transfer St Mary’s Hospitals have been revealed.
An American priest at the centre of the legal tussle over the ownership of the Sh1 billion hospital yesterday said Cardinal John Njue, Mother Superior Christine Kagunye and Sister Florence Muiawere were among eight people ‘who step by step handed over the ownership of the hospital to a private profit-making company’.
Reverend Charles William Fryda, a missionary doctor who maintained that he founded the low-cost hospitals alone, said the transaction was being done behind his back.
Dr Fryda was being cross-examined by a lawyer representing Assumption Sisters of Nairobi (ASN), who are the defendants in a case that Fryda filed in 2010 seeking orders to restrain the nuns order from dealing with the hospital.
“I do not remember the names of the five others but they were doing this step by step to alienate the property and transfer it to Regina Pacis University College,” said the priest from US-based Maryknoll fathers and brotherhood order.
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Protracted Battle
The protracted ownership battle before Nakuru Environment and Lands Court judge Sila Munyao also involves four parcels of land in Elementaita (Nakuru), Sagana and two in Nairobi, one being the land in Lang’ata in which the hospital is situated.
Fryda told the court that he had enlisted the trusteeship of the Sisters to the properties since he had no legal entity to register them.
He said an attempt to solve the matter before exploding to the public failed, despite the involvement of the Nuncio, a Pope’s representative in the country. But ASN’s lawyer questioned him over the claims, producing a series of letters he had authored showing they were co-founders of the hospital.
