Stakeholders call for jail terms for property sector ‘scammers’

Stakeholders at the 19th East Africa Business Network investment conference are calling for tougher sanctions against real estate and property business operators that defraud unsuspecting Kenyans o their hard-earned money in the name of investment.
The sentiments come just days after thousands of Kenyans are reported to have lost up to KS 14 billion through the Cyton High Yield Solutions LLP, a subsidiary of Cyton Investments. Under the scheme, 3,116 customers had been convinced into investing millions of money into a plan that promised them a return of 18%.
Mercy Wandia, a Realtor based in the US state of Texas, had posed a question to the panel seeking to know the thoughts of property developers who are displaying their products at the three-day conference. Among the panelists were John Latham, the Executive Director of Unity Homes and Soil Merchants‘ Rufus Gacheru.
“The issue is not a lack of punitive laws but rather about not applying the law to punish the offenders, who make it difficult for legitimate businesses have a bad name,” Latham said in response to a question by Kurunzi News Managing Editor Milton Nyakundi, who is covering the conference.
“How would you like to see the regulatory and law enforcement agencies deal with the rogue people who are getting into the industry and scamming people, thereby ending up make you the good guys have to answer the credibility question so many times,” Nyakundi had posed.
“We are 100% for the implementation of the laws to send people to jail,” said Gacheru.
“Even in the spaces we engage and interact as property business operators we have ejected these people and told them we will have nothing to do with them because they are giving the industry a bad name.
“They either refund the money to the investors, apologize and go into a probation period before they can be allowed to fully operate again or go to jail.”
Gacheru, whose company has been in the property business for close to two decades, wants to see the property sector in Kenya regulated in the same way as it is in the United States to provide proper guardrails and protect investors from unscrupulous merchants.
“We would like to see a licensing system similar to what happens here in the US such that once you are found to have violated the licensing terms then your are removed from practice and blacklisted. This is something we believe can make people stay away from the sector and make it expensive to defraud people in the name of selling property to them.”
Other property companies displaying their products at the conference include Zanzibar MB Homes, Kitisuru Amani Gardens and AMG Realtors, among others.