Former Nokia CEO has been summoned to a Nairobi court for illegally collection tax information of a Kenyan tech company.
Our Kenyan justice system is not completely broken, we may appear to be incompetent in many areas however every once in a while our system works. CEO of Nokia Rajee Suri and Aapo Saariviti and their lawyers were summoned by the Milimani Senior resident magistrate David Ndugi to appear in a virtual court and plead to a number of charges related to Technoservice’s tax records.
The Kenyan tech company has accused Nokia of obtaining tax records from the Kenya revenue authority and used it illegally in a pending case. However the case was not made public and was withdrawn according to court documents.
When will they appear in court?
Rajee and his team are to attend the virtual court on March 16th at 2pm.
Court records show:
“Tax records are confidential, yet it would appear that the applicant’s tax filings were disclosed to the respondents or their representatives who were able to use the records in the ICC arbitration,”
If you’re wondering why the Directorate of Criminal Investigations (DCI) and the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) did anything about these allegations? it was confirmed that none of the two took any actions against Nokia or its agents. The tax information was obtained by Nokia from KRA between September 2018 and March 2019.
Why did the collect this information?
Nokia’s motive was to halt all the arbitration proceedings with the tax information. Technoservice Director filed a complaint with DCI and the DPP but nothing was done about it.
Nokia’s argument and defense has been the fact that they are foreigners and wish to be treated diplomatically, in other words they hope to be treated fairly because our laws could be too harsh perhaps.
The two companies have had an ongoing war since 2006 when the Kenyan company accused Nokia of breaching a partnership contract between them. So far, the DCI accepted that they did receive the complaint however they could not do anything about it as the technoservice director failed to turn up to record statements.