A giant telecommunication Company, Safaricom is on the spot for facilitating transactions by Dusit terror attack supects.
The Director of Criminal Investigations George Kinoti is considering charges against the giant telecommunication company. However, the company’s Chief Executive Officer Bob Collymore has defended the company saying their hands are clean.
Detectives are investigating how Sh9 million used to finance the Dusit terror attack was sent through the M-Pesa network.
“We don’t think we have done anything wrong. People use Mpesa to bring money into the country and withdraw it using standard procedures,” said Bob Collymore, CEO of Safaricom, yesterday. He confirmed that a Safaricom team had met the DCI last week to explain Mpesa procedures.
“Suspicious transactions are reported to the Financial Reporting Centre. If we see irregular transactions from certain parts of the country or world, we will file a Suspicious Transaction Report. We did file STRs on some of the Dusit transfers. We also terminated their Mpesa tills before the Dusit attack,” he said.
Initial investigations had revealed that one of the terror suspects, Hassan Nur, received Sh9 million from South Africa through M-Pesa over three months. The cash was then sent to Somalia where al Shabaab is based.
Nur had 52 M-Pesa agent accounts with 47 of them were registered between October and December last year, each with a SIM card. He used different IDs to register the SIM cards.
Safaricom is required to vet all huge transactions known as super agents, while banks are also bound by the same regulations of know their customers.
Just recently, Haji received a file from the DCI indicting five banks over their role in the Sh1 billion NYS scandal.