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The Standard newspaper has this week been carrying an exclusive series where their Washington correspondent interviewed Alnoor Kassam, now doing very well as an entrepreneur in Calgary, Canada.

Many younger generation Kenyans have no idea who Alnoor Kassam is. Yet behind this name is one of the most amazing Kenyan business stories of innovation, which I am about to tell.

Alnoor Kassam, as I remember him, was a short bespectacled man with a funny walk (almost a limp). But he built a Kshs 100 billion (annual turnover) business from almost nothing, in a very short space of time. That was the Diners Club Turnover shortly before his empire came crashing down.

Kassam bought the local Diners Club franchise when it was struggling. Those running it then saw it as a headache business where collections were quite often difficult. Kassam saw it as a legal way to "print money" because the 5% per month interest rate on Diners Club credit card balances actually meant a 60% per annum rate.

Kassam's first business on graduating as a Chartered accountant and returning to Kenya in 1979 had been a book match company called Empire Match Company. Book matches are those small matches that open like a book and often have advertisements printed on their front. With the sort of margins he was making from this small business, Kassam must have been very excited about the prospects in Diners.

However like a vast majority of Asian business persons in Kenya then and now, the match company was his legitimate business or cover, but he had another much more lucrative illegal business on the side that was his main cash cow. Kassam was an illegal foreign exchange dealer. In those days, it was illegal to hold or trade in foreign currency. Kassam found ways, using his foreign contacts of obtaining foreign currency, which he sold at a premium in the forex-starved local market.

On purchasing the Kenyan Diners franchise and with a little help from an American program that uses retired professionals and entrepreneurs to give technical advice to businesses in third world countries, Alnoor Kassam was able to build the local Diners Club franchise into one of the fastest growing and most innovative organizations ever seen in these shores.

Employees were motivated with huge cash rewards for performance and ideas that would improve customer service and profits. The workplace at Diners became one of the most exciting places anybody in Kenya would be privileged enough to work in. Some of the innovations that resulted included 24 hour round-the-clock banking services and drive-in banking amongst a host of other very innovative ideas that had never before been seen in these shores. A major subsidiary, Diners Finance quickly followed.

But the problem subsidiary that brought everything crashing down was TradeBank.

Kassam bought the bank from an Israeli national by the name of Gad Zeevi and was informed that TradeBank had loaned HZ construction Shs 400 million. That money actually went directly into the pockets of the then all-powerful cabinet minister and Moi confidante Nicholas Kipyator Biwott. Kassam came up with all sorts of schemes to recover this colossal amount owed to TradeBank, including acquiring the building that almost cost him his life, Yaya Centre as an asset against the cash owed, but the loan was never recovered. In fact it caused the collapse of TradeBank and Alnoor's business empire in Kenya.

The other big mistake Kassam made was to get mixed up with politicians. Kassam's life was threatened many times and this was how he finally had to flee the country for dear life through Tanzania after some security officers turned up at his office one day to arrest him.

In his account of how he escaped, published in the Standard this week, Kassam says he invited the arresting officers for lunch while he made good his escape through a back entrance they probably did not know about. Or did he just bribe them, as is widely believed?

Kassam claims that he has told all in the Standard, but there are a number of mysteries that linger like this one. How do you get arresting officers to allow you out of their sight? By just inviting them to lunch? Or did he mean he invited them to "chai?"

Read the fascinating Standard newspaper articles on Alnoor Kassam;

Alnoor Kassam Confessions Part I

Alnoor Kassam Confessions Part 2

Alnoor Kassam Confessions Part 3

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