Anne Amadi: I'm not involved in Sh102m gold racket

Chief Registrar of the Judiciary Anne Amadi has denied involvement in a Sh102 million gold scandal.

Ms Amadi has accused a British businessman of dragging her name into the case to destroy her reputation.

She now wants the court to lift the order that froze her personal accounts, arguing that Demetrios Bradshaw and his company Bruton Gold Trading LLC misled the court to issue an illegal order not supported by facts.

"The complainant has no evidence against me to warrant the drastic orders freezing my accounts. The orders has made me unable to carry on with my daily duties and fend for my family and may result in me undergoing financial embarrassment," swears Amadi in her affidavit.

In her response to the suit filed through lawyer Ochieng Oduol, Amadi states that she resigned from her law firm, Amadi and Associates, in 2014 after being appointed the Chief Registrar and left the management to her son and two partners.

She swore that she does not understand how her name was dragged in the case when she never benefited from the alleged gold scam.

According to the Chief Registrar, Bradshaw misled the court through fake evidence to obtain the orders freezing her accounts and those of the law firm.

"He deliberately suppressed and manipulated the facts of the matter with the intent of misleading the court to obtain the illegal orders," says Amadi.

The only other time she got involved in the firm, she argues, was in June 2020 when she helped the son Brian Ochieng Amadi, and partners Andrew Kiarie and Adrian Topoti to open a client account at ABC Bank.

Oduol, in his submissions, says the businessman's application was defective since his claims were made outside the country and his affidavit was sworn in a country that does not practice common law.

"His affidavit in support of the application should have not been admitted in the case. He did not even support his claims with any admissible evidence to justify the orders issued by the court."

In an affidavit on behalf of the law firm, Kiarie denied conspiring with two businessmen to defraud Bruton Gold Trading LLC USD742,206 (Sh102,090,435) for the supply of 1,500 kilograms of gold bars.

Kiarie says he was not party to the deal between Bradshaw, businessman Daniel Kangara and Liberian national Edward Taylor, and only allowed its client to use the escrow account to transact the money.

"Their application against the law firm is frivolous, vexatious, and callous and a clear abuse of the court process. Their intention was to spoil the reputation of the Chief Registrar of the Judiciary and drag her in the case which she knows nothing about," says the lawyer.

According to him, it was Bradshaw who requested the law firm to act on its behalf during the transaction and was not privy to what business they were dealing with.

Bradshaw claims that in September 2021, his company was interested in buying gold from Kenya when Taylor introduced him to Kangara as a person dealing in gold export.

They then signed an agreement in which Kangara would deliver the 1,500kgs of gold to his company in Dubai.

He told the court that he sent the first installment of USD592,970 (Sh81,563,023) to the law firm and completed the balance of USD149,236 (Sh20,527,411) in November 2021, but never received the gold consignment.

Justice David Majanja yesterday declined to lift the orders that froze Amadi's accounts and instead disqualified himself from the case and referred it to the Commercial Court principal judge Alfred Mabeya.