How bank's failure to spot missing hyphen helped fraudster

At the time of his death, a British naval officer who also represented Kenya in sailing in the 1960 Olympic Games wrote his name as Williams Bentley-Buckle, with a hyphen.

However, years after, a daring imposter approached Suntra Investment Bank armed with a document featuring a passport with a name Anthony William Bentley Buckle.

That simple and perhaps easy-to-ignore symbol aided the unknown person in transferring Buckle’s shares in the East Africa Breweries Limited and eventually selling them.

It would also emerge that the other details in the passport were also wrong.

Verifying the little hyphen difference, plus a postal address, and date of birth would have alerted the bank that the imposter was not the owner.

For this reason, the bank has been ordered to pay Buckle’s children Sh10 million compensation and restore nearly 100,000 shares held by the deceased.

It emerged that the family name had long been styled “Bentley-Buckle” with a hyphen on the 1977 share certificates.

Court of Appeal Judges Francis Tuiyott, Joel Ngugi and George Odunga in their judgment, affirmed Justice Mary Kasango’s verdict that the lender was negligent for failing to ascertain if the walk-in imposter was the deceased.

“The impostor could not have opened the account or lodged the immobilisation request; and without the second respondent’s (Custody and Registrar Services Limited) relaxed back-end verification, the impostor could not have established title and cleared the immobilisation hurdle. The losses flowed from converging breaches by both the appellant (Suntra) and the second respondent,” the bench headed by Justice Tuiyott observed.

In the case, the court heard that the person who eventually accessed Buckle’s Central Depository and Settlement (CDS) account had a forged passport. It emerged that the hyphen was missing in the name, the citizenship and date of birth were different.

The most telling difference, the court heard, was the hyphen.

Lieutenant-Commander Bentley–Buckle, who was fondly known as BB in the military, had huge investments in Kenya including nearly 100,000 shares of East Africa Breweries Limited at the time of his death in May 2010.

Williams’ family only came to learn of his shares long after his death. To their surprise and bewilderment, they were informed that the shares had been sold.

The officer’s son and daughter then filed a lawsuit against Suntra Investment Bank, and Custody and Registrars Services Limited and set out to prove that their father could not have possible sold the shares.

On May 30,2019 High Court Judge Mary Kasango ruled that the sale of Williams’ EABL shares was fraudulent.

“The defendants shall equally restore to the plaintiffs the 99,100 East African Breweries Limited shares of Anthony William Bentley-Buckle (deceased) within 90 days from the date of this judgment,” Justice Kasango ruled.

Nicholas William Bentley–Buckle, who works as a yacht broker in Hampshire, UK, and his sister Deborah Mary were granted Sh28 million in damages, besides the restoration of the shares whose current value is nearly Sh20 million.

“On the passing away of his, and his sister’s, father, Nicholas began the process of identifying assets of the deceased. On perusing the deceased’s documents, he and his sister found out that the deceased was an owner of EABL shares, amongst others,” court documents show.

It was at this point that the siblings reached out to Nairobi-based Custody and Registrars Services Limited, which was in charge of record-keeping for the brewer.

The firm informed Nicholas that his father’s shares had been immobilised and subsequently sold in 2007. Until 2012, share certificates existed in hard copy before the directive to digitise, which ensured that their owners could have them in the same way money is held in bank accounts, in the conversion technically known as immobilisation.

But it is how the fraud was executed that puzzled the judge, and possibly pointed to a much wider societal problem.

Navy as a decorated officer, used his British passport as his official identification including when purchasing the EABL shares. Williams would retire back home in Hampshire in 1975 while aged 55, and only travelled back to Kenya twice.

It was, however, discovered that a forged Kenyan passport with his exact names.

The impostor, who is yet to be identified, even set up a fake email address: buckle@hotmail.com.

“There are several discrepancies between the deceased shareholder’s passport forwarded to us by Nicholas and the forged passport forwarded by the person who immobilised the shares,” Custody and Registrars said in court.

But Justice Kasango found the two firms to have been negligent in dealing with their client’s asset. She, however, said there was no proof that they colluded to disinherit Williams.

“What was proved is that the defendants by their acts or omissions acted negligently in the immobilisation and eventual sale of the deceased’s EABL shares,” reads the ruling.