Market dominant telecommunications operator, Safaricom is facing serious internal tests in dealing with corporate theft instigated by its own staff. According to insiders, Safaricom has lost close to Ksh 600 million this year, directly and Ksh 3billion indirectly.
Ms Warui left Safaricom on March 20, 2015 after signing a mutual separation agreement that was to see her get a Sh47.2 million exit package. But about a year later, she sued for unlawful termination, claiming that she was coerced into signing the exit deal.
Safaricom Fined
Last week, High Court Judge Maureen Onyango ruled that Safaricom did not follow the right procedure in letting Ms Warui go, and ordered the telco to pay her an additional Sh14.5 million — eight months’ worth of her salary.
Safaricom had asked the court to order that Ms Warui refund the Sh47.2 million in the event that her case was successful, arguing that by suing, she had breached the terms of the separation agreement. Justice Onyango declined to give the order.
According to senior managers privy to the details, Safaricom Customer Care Director, Pauline Warui was ordered out of office and escorted out of the Safaricom Headquarters after being called into a meeting with the company’s CEO Bob Collymore.
Ms Warui said she was sitting an exam when then CEO Bob Collymore called and asked her to report to her boss for an urgent appraisal. When she got there, she claims that Collymore told her she was being let go. He then led her to a boardroom, where the corporate affairs and legal director was waiting with the separation agreement.
Before the removal of Ms Warui, ground was prepared with Janet Atika called by Bob Collymore and ordered to go to Safaricom Call centre at JCC where she was informed that she was taking over from Pauline Warui. Pauline was then escorted out of Safaricom headquarters by a retinue of security men led by Safaricom’s Head of Security, Mike Kariuki.
Safaricom Insider Fraud
In terminating her, Safaricom said that investigations had revealed that its call-centre system data had been altered to show that the department was doing well when, in reality, the performance was below target.
Even as Safaricom claims that it has sorted the management problems, call centre staff are not a happy lot. The staff earns a starting salary of Ksh 55,000 but are required to handle close to 200 calls per day per person with not more than 30 minutes in breaks.
The staff members are also complaining that promotion is so skewed that sometimes it depends on who you sleep with. This has downed the morale of the young people. Too much use of the headphones has negative effects on the call centre staff but nobody is willing to listen to the staff while any journalist who would dare touch the story will be slapped with a meaningless lawsuit.
The investigation against the senior management was secretly ordered by then CEO, Bob Collymore in December after the dismissal of some 40 employees (base at the Jambo Contact Centre – JCC – along Mombasa road) who were said to be involved in airtime and M-Pesa fraud.
Some other employees included the daughter to a senior civil servant were sacked after being found to be involved in premium rate services (PRSP) fraud. Other points of fraud in the telco happened through the Lipa Na Mpesa service. Key managers are said to have illegally developed avenues in the system where they would manipulate payments and get money out of the system.
Another case is where a Finance Department employee (based on 4th floor) stole more than Ksh 30million from the company before discovery. The discovery was made when the employee was outside the country for official duty.
When Bob Collymore was at the helm of the Telco giant, he seems to be operating in a way that made Safaricom to look like is not interested in taking any legal action against its employees. A source has informed Kenyan Bulletin that Safaricom mostly focused on removing the masterminds and frauds from office. There has been allegations of the Telco company buying media silence through advert or promotions splashed everywhere on dailies.
The same way safaricom handled the case facilities management staff called Charles Karimi who is said to have escaped with enough computers to start a school without the knowledge of top Safaricom bosses. He was allegedly dismissed when the discrepancies were discovered.
