The hearing of a case where two Safaricom employees allegedly planned to defraud the company of a total of Ksh300 million has been postponed to June.
Milimani Law Courts chief Magistrate Wendy Kegendo adjourned the hearing against the employees namely Simon Billy Kinuthia, Brian Njoroge Wamatu and their co- accomplice Benedict Kabugi Ndung’u to June 28, 2022, since the magistrate was engaged in other official duties.
The trio is accused of unlawfully copying and transferring privileged Safaricom subscriber data from the company’s database to an unauthorised person, Charles Njuguna Kimani.
They are said to have demanded Ksh300 million from Safaricom with intent to steal between May 1 and June 7 at Safaricom offices in Westlands, Nairobi.
Kinuthia was a senior manager in charge of networks and M-Pesa systems auditor while Njoroge was the head of regional expansion at the telco.
The two are accused of breaching their contractual and statutory duty by sharing confidential information on betting trends, with a view to selling it to a leading sports betting company.
During the last hearing of the case, a senior DCI police officer Peter Maina, seconded at Safaricom narrated to court that the accused persons attempted to sell information about gambling trends on millions of subscribers to a leading sports betting firm.
Maina said the telco raised a complaint with the Directorate of Criminal Investigations (DCI) about subscriber data leakage on betting trends.
The complaint came after Kabugi sent the leaked data on subscribers betting trends to a senior Safaricom executive with the intention of getting a payout to prevent the release of the information to the public.
The officer said they tracked down Kabugi and arrested him on June 6, 2019, on Waiyaki Way.
“We laid a trap and arrested him as they conversed about data leakage with another suspect identified as Charles Njuguna,” he said.
Upon their arrest, the two allegedly told the police that it was Safaricom employees Kinuthia and Wamatu, who had supplied them with the data.
The police then used Kabugi to lure the Safaricom employees to a restaurant in Kilimani, where they were arrested and later charged.
