DJ and Mworia were very optimistic that mall would be open in September...that's two months back now. If you pass by the project it looks no where near completion. Maybe the slow down in completion may be a reflection of cash flow problems.
And to me that mall seems a little bit out of the way from town. Why would I pass muthaiga mini market, village market, ridgeways mall and the new rosslyn Riviera and ciata city coming up to do grocery shopping etc when I can do all that in these malls that I have passed. They better have something special to pull in the clientele.

And the project is not complete yet! By the time it is done it might end up like the payslip of a Kenyan policeman. The shareholders will be called to be told what they HAD and given a breakdown of where it all went!

Such deals are the norm in Kenya. Like Merali who build two real estate projects with cash from ECB then the loans were written off before it was sold.So in any investment do lots of due diligence to safeguard your cash.

Similar to what was done at Uchumi, eh?

Exactly. Ciano and team were the CEO and managers yet they were also the main suppliers. Do you think they care when share price tanks? NO!

Corporate Kenya is worse than GoK.

This same guy who lost big in Uchumi bought the Uchumi Branch next to KPLC years back from UCHUMI at a reasonable price using board and leased back to UCHUMI at reasonable rent.

We have to accept that even in school there were guys who were sharper than Ass.

This was round two. Round one was Dj!

Kipngetich has been a clean guy so far in his previous positions. Any skeletons?

Was in school with CEO of Jamii Bora and worked with Tim. Clean guys. Their ambition I think is to have a strong solid bank and also diversify their investment hence Uchumi.

I think they saw the areas to make money was in Banking and retail sectors.

This bear seems to have pushed people to extreme pessimism and I'm one of them.
Centum not too long ago was a darling on Wazua. They had great projects in the pipeline, spitting a good game with regards to their vision for the future and getting great deals. While the stock price was going up people were happy. And ofcourse the Business Daily correspondent based in Centum kept supplying a steady stream of good news on the counter.
The bear seems to have hit Centum shareholders the worst, they were the most optimistic and to add insult to injury while shareholders lost value at the NSE, Centum was going crazy announcing how it's giving the biggest employee bonuses in the NSE.
The truth though always seems to be in the middle of extreme optimism and extreme pessimism.
Yes there's a stink coming from Centum because of the bonuses. The delay of the Two Rivers project shouldn't be a surprise for a project of its size. It's a little bit unclear whether there's some shady deals going on at Centum that skews returns for shareholders.

At the same time, Centum still remains quite a well diversified company with interests in multiple sectors. The fact that they held UAP at much less value on their books than what they eventually got (I think 2.2 billion versus 5 billion actual value) shows that they are being conservative and not trying to inflate asset values. They do have quite a number of talented guys at the company. James Mworia is a CFA charter holder (which means that he's smart and worked hard to earn that) and some of the employees are Tutu fellows, Alliance high school alumni etc. So you'd think that these are not the kind of people that would like to blow a career by taking a company down.

Their project execution has been quite exemplary - see Two Rivers from vision to execution and they have been quite bold with their projects. It's tough to find a team like that in Kenya and at a time when Africa is full of opportunities that would really be beneficial to a potential investor.

DJ CK is a looming presence on the company so you have to decide for yourself if he's likely to bring the company down and perhaps deal with another appearance at the courts a la Uchumi times. For the most part you have to check what his incentives are. Being such a large shareholder at Centum and staked his name on the company, he's more likely to benefit if the company valuation goes really north. Isn't his ambition to be a billionaire and appear on Forbes? Centum seems like the only vehicle that could achieve this for him.

Centum seems to have lost trust because of excessive executive compensation - they can redeem themselves by truly aligning employee and shareholder interests. For example, bonuses should at the very least not be paid on an annual basis but maybe in tranches of 5 years - that's anyways part of the 5 year planning tranches. That way employees focus on the long term. And atleast a large % of bonuses should be paid in company shares so employees and shareholders are in the same bus.
Summary: Centum is not as good or as bad as people make it out to be due to ups and downs of the NSE.