Tatu City, Kenya’s Largest Private City, Faces an Investor Showdown

KENYA · BUSINESS

Tatu City’s original Kenyan investors are mounting a last-ditch legal push, asking Mauritius’ highest court for permission to take the fight over Kenya’s largest private city to arbitration in London, even as their shares head for the auctioneer’s hammer.

Tatu City’s decade-old dilution claim returns

Steve Mwagiru and Etienne Delbar, acting through BlackKnight Holdings, want the Supreme Court of Mauritius to let them start proceedings at the London Court of International Arbitration on behalf of Manhattan Coffee Investment Holdings, Business Daily reported this week. The company is in liquidation, so no case can begin without the court’s leave.

Filed in November 2025, the plea will be heard next month. It targets what the applicants call the unlawful dilution of Manhattan Coffee’s stakes in Cedar IV and Cedarsoc, the Mauritian vehicles behind Tatu City and coffee-estate owner Kofinaf.

“The share issuances were undertaken after the conversion periods had expired and at an undervalue, thereby unlawfully diluting Manhattan Coffee’s shareholding,” the supporting documents argue.

How a coffee farm became Kenya’s flagship private city

In the late 2000s, Mwagiru, his mother Rosemary Wanja, former central bank governor Nahashon Nyagah, Bidco chair Vimal Shah and Delbar assembled more than 5,000 acres of coffee farms off Thika Road. The bet rode the Vision 2030 boom and the new Thika Superhighway.

Ownership went offshore. Cedar IV, a Mauritian company, owns 99.9 percent of Tatu City; Cedar IV in turn is held by Rendeavour’s SCF Holdings II alongside Manhattan Coffee, the minority investors’ vehicle.

Kofinaf, the second company in the structure, holds the coffee estates that came with the land. Both vehicles sit under Mauritian law, which is why the decisive battles are fought in Port Louis and London rather than Nairobi.

The relationship soured fast, and the project’s story since has been one of courtrooms as much as construction. The development itself has kept growing into Kenya’s most advanced special economic zone, home to factories, schools and housing.

The fraud award that broke the partnership

In February 2018, an LCIA tribunal found Manhattan Coffee, Shah, Nyagah and Mwagiru had defrauded SCF Holdings II by claiming a $20 million deposit had been paid to land vendors when it had not. It awarded $15 million plus interest and costs.

The award was never challenged in time, and never paid. SCF petitioned in Mauritius to wind up Manhattan Coffee, which was liquidated in 2023.

On May 16 this year, the Privy Council, the final court of appeal for Mauritius, ruled Mwagiru had no standing to keep litigating in the company’s name. That opened the way for liquidators to sell its Cedar shares.

Mwagiru argues SCF could buy those shares and offset the price against its own arbitration debt, tightening Rendeavour’s grip on the project.

A ruling in the applicants’ favour would not restore their shares by itself. It would, though, put a live claim on the table just as those shares change hands.

A Saudi partner arrives as the fight resumes

Rendeavour, founded by New Zealand-born financier Stephen Jennings, is meanwhile deepening its bench. On July 3 it signed a joint venture with Saudi Arabia’s Mabani Aljazeera Holding Group, whose local unit Swan Properties took a stake of 50 percent minus one share in the company developing Jabali Towers, per Billionaires.Africa.

The twin towers, at 88,000 square metres, are planned as the mixed-use anchor of Tatu City’s special economic zone. New Gulf capital is arriving just as the ownership question returns to court.

What the case means for frontier investors

The saga is a caution on offshore structures: the fate of a Kenyan mega-project is being decided in Mauritius and London, far from Nairobi. Minority rights live or die in the paperwork.

It also shows how resilient the underlying asset is. Through nearly two decades of litigation, Tatu City has kept building, and kept drawing capital, from Kenyan factories to Saudi towers.

For foreign developers, that offshore predictability is precisely the point. For local minority investors, the lesson has been a hard one: the structure that attracted the capital also decided who kept it.

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