An exposé published by a media house based in Colorado, US, has lifted a lid about a Chief Executive Officer who ran a local school founded by a 19-year-old to its death.
In an article published by 5280 Magazine in its January edition, the outlet tracked down the activities of the suspect in question from his activities in Colorado and California to Nairobi, Kenya.
According to the investigations, the US-based CEO, whose name has been withheld, arrived in Nairobi in 2015 at a time when the city was quickly amassing a reputation as Africa's Silicon Savannah.
Two years earlier, a 19-year-old Kenyan had successfully founded the Dev School after crowdsourcing Ksh2.4 million. The institution fashioned itself as a coding camp for Kenyan students hungry for programming skills.
As of 2015, the school had graduated 250 students and had amassed good reviews majorly from its alumni network.
The CEO travelled to Nairobi in 2015 and was hired to lead the school in July of that year after promising to diversify the tech world beyond its white players who dominated the industry then.
"It only took two months for that man to begin undoing much of what (the founder) had built. In September, some Dev School employees noticed their latest paychecks hadn’t been deposited," read the exposé.
"After the nonpayment continued through November, one fed-up employee sent out a companywide email putting the new CEO on notice."
After push and pull, the suspect was replaced as a CEO but continued organising tech events in Kenya until an exposé in 2016 ruined his reputation.
According to the founder of the school, the damage had been intense, and the institution shut down in late 2015 despite growing to add a branch in South Suday barely three years after its founding.
5280 Magazine further exposed the suspect's checkered past, including a stint as the manager of the sales department at a company in Sonoma, California, in 2007.
The article claims that the suspect used the company's card to pay for personal errands, including a repair of his car. At some point, he was accused of forging the signature of the owner on cheques.
He was also accused of running similar schemes in Berkeley and Elk Grove both in California as well as multiple times in Colorado. The CEO left Kenya in 2017.
