On the last Saturday of June, four employees of Tarita Group Ltd had gathered at the firm’s offices in Eldoret town for a meeting with their boss, former Energy and Petroleum Regulatory Authority (Epra) Director-General Daniel Kiptoo.
The meeting on the fifth floor of Tarita Centre was to reconcile books of accounts and had become a monthly ritual.
Unlike the norm in past gatherings, Mr Kiptoo drifted in and out of the room, as he asked questions about books of accounts stretching back to December, 2025.
Mr Kiptoo’s mood shifted between satisfaction and frustration, until day turned into night.
Then the meeting stopped being about numbers. According to police records, medical reports and documents reviewed by Nation, the reconciliation meeting gave way to more than 12 hours of alleged unlawful detention, torture and coercion.
The four allege that they were beaten, stripped, threatened and forced to surrender millions of shillings and personal property to Tarita Group Limited in exchange for their freedom.
Noise from revelers in surrounding bars and nightclubs would make it difficult to distinguish between pleasure and distress calls.
The discrepancy questioned in the meeting was in the figures. A police report seen by the Nation shows that following the meeting that went way past sunset, it was established that Sh96 million was missing.
But copies of a deed of transfer in our possession shows the company suffered an exposure of Sh200 million.
The Nation reached out to Mr Kiptoo on his known mobile phone numbers on Monday and Tuesday. He had not called back, or responded to text messages by the time of this story’s publication.
“The meeting went on up to 2100hrs where it was established that a sum of Sh96,000,000 was missing,” the police report reads, adding that the four employees were given two options of either producing the whole missing money or end up dead.
The source, who requested anonymity to protect his loved ones and his businesses, intimated that the men who held them incommunicado stuffed their mouths to limit the screams.
“The reconciliation you are doing is just back and forth… The four of you in here will have to get me the Sh92 million we are talking about,” the source quotes Mr Kiptoo as saying during the incident.
Then four heavily-built masked men stormed into the room. Each was assigned an individual “to deal with”. Since formality had not yielded the desired results, the mission of the masked men was to recoup the money violently, according to the victims’ account.
Daniel Kiptoo the director of Tarita Group Ltd.
Photo credit: File | Nation Media Group
With a clear cut out job, they descended on the four with blows and kicks. They tortured them indiscriminately and then stripped. With the clothes off, went their dignity.
The properties, which they owned, as well as their lives, were on the line too. In the process, in the cover of the night, and now under duress, the four were forced to reveal the amounts of money in their personal accounts and transfer their properties to Tarita Group Limited, police records show.
The torture continued as well until June 28, the record reveal.
The Nation is in possession of a signed “deed of settlement, asset transfer undertaking and continuity support agreement” between one of the individuals and the company, Tarita Group Limited, made on June 28, 2026.
To recoup the exposure it suffered, Tarita Group Limited was eyeing a two-acre land, three plots and commercial hub from the source.
In between the beatings, he was presented before the “boss” (Referring to Kiptoo). But besides being frail from the torture, our source claimed, the boss ordered his men to beat him some more.
“My face was oval… it was unbearable… unaambiwa leo ni ile siku ya mwisho … a sock is put into your mouth… a deed of transfer was printed and I signed... the thing had started at 9pm and it was now morning,” narrated our source, whom we will call Robert to conceal the identity.
Among the valuables that were sought after included land, cars and any amounts of money.
Part of the transfer of the property needed the presence of witnesses. And, partly, that was the saving grace. And each of them was asked to call in their spouses to actualise the transfer.
When the first spouse walked in and the transfer was done, it also served as the litmus test for the remaining trio to know how their fate would pan out.
But even after the signing of the deeds, which would mark the beginning of the legal process of letting go of what they had to save their lives, it did not exactly turn out that way. They continued to hold the couple incommunicado.
Suspecting that all that could go wrong was on the verge of going wrong, that’s when, on the pretext of reminding the spouse to come, one of the subdued individuals fired a follow up text to the wife.
This time, he told the spouse to come to wherever they were accompanied by the lawyer and the police to save them.
The spouse had delayed, partly because she was planning their baby’s birthday party.
Robert might have survived the beating, but the psychological torture of being stripped before a close relative is something he is yet to wrap his head around. It will stay longer with him, long after the physical pain is gone.
“She watched me being stripped off and beaten… that was bad… the helplessness,” Robert sobbed.
Moments later, police officers who responded to the distress call and arrested six suspects namely Alfred Too, Edwine Gichia, Everline Choge, Joseph Njuguna, Stephen Ngigi and Martin Kamau.
Confirming they saved the four, Turbo Sub-County Police Commander Patrick Wekesa, said the investigations are ongoing. But they are moving slowly on the matter because there is pressure to settle it out of court.
“At around 1000h the reportee arrived at the office (at Tarita Center),” the police incident report reads, adding that in the meeting they were together with others. “The discussions were on management report and reconciliations of sales.”
Business Registration Service records indicate that all 999 shares in Tarita Group Ltd are owned by Tarita Group (Mauritius) Ltd. As the name suggests, the company is registered in Port Louis, Mauritius.
Alfred Cheruiyot Too is listed as the sole director of Kenya’s Tarita Group Ltd, but holds no shares.
Last August, the High Court blocked Mr Kiptoo and Tarita Group Ltd from putting a petrol station, greenhouses and other permanent developments on a piece of land registered to Barnabas Tuitoek Bargoria.
Bargoria was Kiptoo’s father. Kiptoo’s sister, Loise Cherop, filed an application seeking those orders, alleging that her brother is a director of Tarita Group Ltd.
Cherop held that Tarita Group (Mauritius) Ltd presented the Bargoria family’s postal address to the BRS, which she held is evidence that Kiptoo is hiding behind an offshore entity to disenfranchise other beneficiaries of their father’s estate.
Kiptoo denied encroaching on their father’s land without permission, and said his sister did not produce any evidence. He, however, admitted to being in possession of the land.
In barring Kiptoo and Tarita Group Ltd from developing the land, the High Court said Cherop had provided enough material to suggest that Kiptoo may have intermeddled with their father’s land.
Under Kenyan law, intermeddling with a deceased person’s property is a criminal offence.
Whether Kiptoo intermeddled with the land will be determined in the judgment of the succession case still ongoing before the High Court in Eldoret.
Days before the June ordeal, there were telltale signs of friction between one of the individuals who was tortured, at least, going by the text messages that Nation has seen.
And in a classic example of the biblical Goliath and David, in this case, an employee and the employer, Kiptoo promised him doom.
“Utakipata ,” Kiptoo texted, after sending him locations to some of his properties.
The barrage of exchange did not end there. In a classical twist, again, the night of June 28, hours after the four escaped the worse that they imagined, representatives of Tarita Group Limited reported a case of “stealing by service” to Eldoret Police Station at 2056h.
“You think you’re smart… there’s no honour among thieves,” Kiptoo sent this text to one of the four individuals, accompanied with a photo of the occurrence book filed.
“You will provide the same to the police. The money trail and the myriad of assets held by you, your wife, family, and proxies… they will all be traced,” another text from Kiptoo reads.
Robert, who says they survived by sheer luck, says he wished his employer would look at the books.
“At some point what we had was tied to (fuel) subsidy and did not allow us to trade freely,” Robert explained.
“In my case, I, personally, do other things… I have a real estate portfolio and someone may easily conclude I am stealing from the company… the focus was not in what numbers are saying but what he wanted from us (Sh96 million).”
“When I was being beaten up he (referring to Mr Kiptoo) was smiling… Everything is at a standstill as we do not know what we will do next. The people who beat us are out there. They made a threat saying if you go to the media, you die. At least I will have shared my story,” Robert narrated.
Shaken to the core, one of the patients walked into the hospital but looked “very sick”, according to the medical report, with swelling around both eyes, face and neck.
Physical examination revealed the patient had bruises on the left side of the forehead and an injury on the right ear.
A CT scan of the head showed a very small area of less than 1 cm in the front-left part of the brain that looked slightly different from normal brain tissue. It may represent a tiny abnormality but the finding is subtle, and the radiologist was not certain.
“This is generally a normal report, no worries. The only negative thing is the blood clots [on] the tissues of the head,” said an independent doctor we asked to help explain the medical report.
