Businesswoman Mary Wambui.
Before Mary Wambui Mungai became associated with billion-shilling tenders, presidential appointments, tax battles and the troubled Glee Hotel empire, she lived a much simpler life.
In the 1990s, those who knew her remember a woman living in Umoja I, far from the manicured lawns of Runda and the polished corridors where State contracts are discussed, negotiated and converted into private fortunes. Her story did not begin in the world of luxury hotels, regulators, banks and court files. It began in Nairobi’s Eastlands where struggle, ambition and survival work in tandem.
But ambition, in Kenya’s tender state, can be a dangerous apprenticeship.
Ms Wambui’s early breakthrough is said to have come through clearing and forwarding work connected to Kenya Power and Lighting Company imports during the reign of Mr Samuel Gichuru, the then-powerful managing director who ran the utility between 1983 and 2003. That was not an ordinary period in the life of Kenya’s parastatals. It was an era when public corporations were not merely service providers. They were also gateways to private wealth, political patronage and procurement networks.
Kenya Power sat at the centre of that economy. It handled major imports, infrastructure supplies and contracts. Those who knew how to enter that space could quickly move from small business to serious money. It was in that environment that Ms Wambui’s business instincts appear to have been sharpened. In 1996, she opened Purma Holdings Limited, a clearing and forwarding company. Its office was on Nairobi’s Koinange Street, opposite City Market — a small but telling address in the geography of Nairobi power.
Koinange Street placed her near banks, lawyers, brokers, civil servants, politicians and dealmakers. It marked her passage from modest enterprise into the opaque world where State contracts, private ambition and political access meet.
This is where she first made her first fortune. From Eastlands, she moved to Runda. The years of the then president, Daniel arap Moi drew her closer to powerful brokers as she began to hobnob with the well-heeled and politically connected. She learnt the corridors of power and utilised them fully.
But what Mary Wambui did not appear to learn from her own rise was that the staircase that lifts a tenderpreneur can also become the trapdoor.
In Kenya, the tenderpreneur is not simply a businessperson but a political creature. Through political connections, she entered the world of aircraft, and she registered Albatross Aviation, based at Wilson Airport. That ownership came to public attention after one of her Cessna 208B Grand Caravan aircraft, 5Y-WMM, crashed in Kondok, South Sudan. Though operated by Phoenix Aviation, it later emerged that its ownership was linked to Ms Wambui and her daughter, Purity Njoki Mungai. It has also been associated with a Bell 407GXP helicopter, 5Y-PHL, used in government operations and high-profile political campaigns, especially involving UDA figures.
As Ms Wambui realised, aviation was not just business. It was a political theatre where the symbolism of arrival, signal proximity to power, mobility, access and capacity. In a country where political campaigns are measured partly by the number of choppers in the sky, Ms Wambui knew that aviation was the new language of influence.
As she built her empire, she got entangled into Jubilee Party politics of former President Uhuru Kenyatta and was closely associated with his then deputy, Dr William Ruto’s wing. In the Jubilee fundraising, Ms Wambui featured prominently as she poured millions into the outfit as part of the inner circle. If more fortunes followed her path, it was as a result of this shrewdness.
Business Daily reported in 2021 that she had earned billions of shillings supplying boots, uniforms and cereals to the military and other State departments. She was also reported to have secured multi-million-shilling deals with Kenya Medical Supplies Authority (Kemsa), including supplies linked to Covid-19 kits. In another report, she was listed among those who supplied Kemsa with KN95 and surgical face masks under a Sh30.5 million tender.
In 2021, as relations between President Kenyatta and DP William Ruto collapsed into open hostility, Ms Wambui found herself in the taxman’s dragnet. She was one of the pro-Ruto business figures who, according to Dr Ruto’s allies, were being targeted by the Kenya Revenue Authority (KRA) in what they viewed as an intimidation campaign disguised as tax enforcement.
That year, Ms Wambui and her daughter, Purity, both directors of Purma Holdings, were accused of failing to pay Sh2.2 billion in taxes. Investigators alleged that between 2014 and 2019, Purma had omitted Sh4.5 billion from its income tax returns, giving rise to the huge tax claim. They further alleged that Wambui was a director and beneficial owner of seven other companies that had defaulted on tax obligations, with investigations pointing to an additional Sh806 million in liabilities.
Then the matter turned dramatic. As KRA officers and police moved in to arrest them, Ms Wambui and her daughter were traced to Weston Hotel — an establishment associated with Dr Ruto. They had reportedly taken refuge there as the dragnet tightened. But by the time the officers arrived, the two had vanished. The rooms were empty. According to reports, officers found personal belongings — handbags, bank cards, cash and car keys. The fugitives had slipped through the net, leaving behind the props of a hurried escape.
For the taxman, it was an embarrassing miss.
After Dr Ruto won the presidency in 2022, Ms Wambui’s fortunes appeared to turn again. In December that year, President Ruto appointed her chairperson of the Communications Authority of Kenya. Within days, KRA moved to withdraw the Sh2.2 billion tax evasion case, telling the anti-corruption court that negotiations with Ms Wambui had been concluded.
The law may have had its explanation. Tax disputes can be negotiated. Cases can be compounded. Prosecutors can withdraw charges. But the optics were difficult to escape. A businesswoman who had been pursued by the taxman was now chairing a powerful public regulator. The State that had pursued her had also elevated her.
But that was not the end of the story. In June 2026, the Auditor-General reported that a company linked to Ms Wambui, Nightingale Enterprises Ltd, had received Sh401.6 million in digital superhighway contracts while she chaired the Communications Authority board. The report said Ms Wambui had resigned as a director of Nightingale shortly after her CA appointment and transferred shares to her daughter. But her daughter reportedly remained a director and majority shareholder during key stages of the tender process.
The question is not only whether a law was technically breached. The deeper issue is moral and institutional. Should a person who built wealth through State procurement be placed in charge of an institution connected to more State-funded contracts? Can resignation from a company, followed by transfer of shares to a close family member, truly remove conflict? Or does it simply move the conflict from one room to another?
Another of her companies, Enterprise Supplies Limited, would later feature in the Kenya National Trading Corporation cooking oil controversy. Purma was contracted to deliver 625,000 jerrycans of cooking oil at Sh2.3 billion, while Enterprise Supplies was contracted to deliver 312,500 jerrycans. Investigators would later say procurement laws had been flouted in some of the awards. It was this controversy, according to Ms Wambui, that would sink her fortunes since she was not paid.
View of the entrance to Glee Hotel, Northern bypass Nairobi County on March 13, 2025.
Then came Glee Hotel. The luxury hotel in Runda was supposed to be the monument of arrival; the glass, concrete and prestige proof that the tender empire had matured into a high-end property. It was meant to declare that Ms Wambui had crossed over from supplier to magnate, from tenderpreneur to respectable investor.
Sign of distress
But Glee Hotel has now become the most visible sign of distress. In June 2026, the High Court ordered Ms Wambui to pay Sh100 million to Equity Bank within seven days as a condition for temporarily stopping the auction of the hotel and other charged properties. The court record showed that Equity Bank had earlier agreed to accept Sh7.75 billion as full and final settlement of the debt owed by Wambui and related entities, representing about 85 per cent of total indebtedness. The settlement was to be financed through a refinancing arrangement with KCB, but the money did not arrive within the agreed time.
Mary Wambui Mungai.
By July 2026, the reprieve had collapsed into a harder reality. Glee Hotel Ltd was placed under administration over the Sh7.75 billion debt. Equity Bank appointed Kamal Anantroy Bhatt of Anant Bhatt LLP as administrator, effective July 6, 2026. The notice said the administrator had taken control of the hotel’s assets and management, and that the directors’ powers to deal with or transact in the company’s assets had ceased.
That is the current state of affairs: Glee Hotel is no longer merely threatened with auction. It is under creditor control.
And that is where we ask whether Wambui’s empire was built on sustainable enterprise or on the confidence that access would always produce the next deal, the next refinancing, the next rescue. When Equity Bank moved against the hotel, the language changed. It was no longer the language of tenders, campaign loyalty, appointments or political proximity. It was the language of creditors, administrators, securities and repayment.
That, on the surface, might be the brutal end of the illusion, but it does not necessarily mean the end of Mary Wambui. In Kenya, political capital often outlives scandal. Businesspeople fall, negotiate, return, reinvent themselves and re-enter the state orbit. Even after President Ruto revoked her appointment as chairperson of the Communications Authority in August 2025, she was separately appointed chairperson of the Athi Water Works Development Agency. Removal from one public office did not mean exile from public office.
But Glee Hotel has punctured the image of invincibility. The same system that helped create the empire has now exposed its fragility. As history has taught us, patronage is not loyalty. It abandons when debt, scandal or political inconvenience becomes too heavy.
Mary Wambui’s story is therefore not simply about one businesswoman. It is about Kenya’s tender state. It shows how modest beginnings can be transformed by procurement, how procurement can feed politics, how politics can protect business, how public appointments can launder controversy, and how debt can finally reveal what power had concealed.
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John Kamau is a PhD candidate in History, University of Toronto. Email: [email protected] X: @johnkamau1
