Retirees' scheme irate members stop AGM over Sh31bn fund mismanagement

An earlier postponed Annual General Meeting of the over 8,000 members of the Kenya Railways Staff Retirement Benefit Scheme at Nairobi’s Railway Club came to an ugly abortion Friday when retirees staged a noisy protest.

The retirees staged a noisy meeting outside the planned venue accusing the scheme’s management of mismanagement of funds amounting to Sh31 billion.

The highly anticipated Annual General Meeting totally failed to start even as the management made attempts to calm down irate members.

“We’re not going to allow any further fleecing by these trustees and it is time we take control of our assets. We were given a cow by our sponsor but if those we entrusted to take care of it cannot give us milk, then let us take our cow back. We the poorest billionaires in town,” said Aggrey Simiyu, a former senior Kenya Railways manager.

Simiyu, who is now a member of a steering committee driving the new approach to manage the multi-billion shilling pension wealth told the press that they had planned to propose the formation of a Railway Pension Management Company run by the pensioners to salvage the struggling scheme.

Court injunctions

The scheme’s troubles set in when the court put an injunction on the sale of its multibillion real estate, as it remains illiquid as its monthly rent collection does not match the obligations of the retirees. There was a plan to sell off the Sh30 billion rental houses to salvage the scheme, which was gagged by litigations currently in court.

Earlier, some retirees under Kenya Railway Pensioners Association had written to the Retirement Benefits Authority Chief Executive Edward Odundo seeking to kick out both the Corporate Trustees (Corporate and Pension Trust Services Limited) and the Chief Executive Officer Simon Nyakundi, a local daily writes.

New twist

Nyakundi clarified that a fresh attempt will be made to hold another AGM but could not tell the timeframe as he was waiting for guidance from the Trustees.

‘We have written to both the regulator (RBA)and the sponsor (Kenya Railways Corporation)because this was an abnormal occurrence. Once a response is relayed to us through the corporate trustees then we will know the way forward We will still have to hold the AGM though, I can’t tell you when,” Nyakundi told the press.