Treasury Cabinet Secretary John Mbadi appointed a senior spy agency official as the next Director General of the Financial Reporting Centre (FRC).
Mbadi appointed the lawyer who is the head of legal at the National Intelligence Service (NIS) Naphtaly Kipchirchir Rono, to replace his spy colleague Saitoti Maika.
This was after he was approved by Parliament.
He will serve for a term of six years.
Maika had served his full term.
Rono was picked from a list of six top candidates whose names were sent to Mbadi for nomination to Parliament.
Rono will be tasked with the responsibility of addressing concerns raised about Kenya’s financial transactions that have left the country on the grey list despite key reforms.
Grey-listing means the country is under increased monitoring and is working with the FATF to address its inability to counter money laundering and terror financing using existing laws, policies and strategies.
It adversely impacts Kenya’s investment attractiveness and undermines its credibility as a reliable regional partner.
On June 17, 2025, President William Ruto signed the Anti-Money Laundering and Combating of Terrorism Financing Laws (Amendment) Act, 2025, into law.
The act is intended to address deficiencies in Kenya’s money laundering and terrorism financing framework as identified by the FATF, the global watchdog for these crimes.
The Paris-based Financial Action Task Force (FATF) failed to remove Kenya from the list in October at the end of a plenary meeting, while removing Africa’s first and second biggest economies of South Africa and Nigeria.
The Task Force in its report March 17, 2025 indicated that Kenya has made progress in resolving some of the technical compliance shortcomings identified in its 2022 Mutual Evaluation Report.
However, despite the positive reports, Kenya remains under active watch, having been included in the grey list alongside Namibia on February 24, 2024, after a ten-year hiatus.
