Phillip Kagucia
Team Leader, Malawi
Phillip Kagucia (OGW) is Team Leader, Malawi, having been promoted to this position in November 2025. He joined the Basel Institute’s International Centre for Asset Recovery team in Malawi in April 2024 as Senior Specialist, Asset Recovery. In his current role, he continues to lend his expertise on asset recovery to various law enforcement agencies in the anti-corruption institutional framework.
Phillip is an advocate with over 20 years of experience in civil litigation and asset recovery. He joined Kenya’s Ethics and Anti-Corruption Commission (EACC) in 2010 after years in private practice. In 2017, he became the first lawyer in Kenya’s history to successfully argue several high-profile cases on forfeiture of unexplained wealth.
As Deputy Director in charge of asset recovery at the EACC, Phillip also served as the Head of the institution’s Mutual Legal Assistance Unit, which relied on international cooperation to prosecute corruption cases. During this time, he was exposed to the rigorous mutual evaluation process of the Financial Action Task Force (FATF). He was a member of Kenya’s national task force established to navigate the assessment of compliance with the FATF recommendations under the Eastern and Southern Africa Anti-Money Laundering Group (ESAAMLG).
Additionally, Phillip has been a trainer on various topics including evidence analysis, unexplained wealth and mutual legal assistance (MLA).
Phillip holds a Bachelor of Law degree from Northumbria University in the UK, a Master of Arts in International Studies from the University of Nairobi and a second Master’s degree in Anti-Corruption Studies from the International Anti-Corruption Academy in Vienna, Austria. For his efforts in anti-corruption law enforcement, particularly in asset recovery, he was awarded with National Honours in the “Order of the Grand Warrior” (OGW) by the President of the Republic of Kenya.
Publications
Case Study 7: Upholding an unexplained wealth judgement in Kenya’s Anglo Leasing affair
This case study describes how Kenya’s civil illicit enrichment legislation enabled the recovery of corruptly acquired assets from a former Chief Accountant at the Treasury.
It examines a 2021 unexplained wealth (illicit enrichment) case in Kenya involving the former Chief Accountant Patrick Ochieno Abachi. The case is related to Kenya’s so-called Anglo Leasing scandal, in which 18 high-value government security contracts were allegedly awarded to fictitious companies in the early 2000s.
It illustrates one set of circumstances in which civil unexplained wealth (or civil illicit enrichment) legislation can be an extremely useful tool to target assets stolen through corruption.
The series of judgments has provided some valuable insights into Kenya’s law targeting unexplained assets, specifically:
- its key features and how they are applied;
- the evidentiary importance of asset declaration forms;
- how to prove assets are “unexplained” through financial analysis of a suspect’s income and assets;
- common legal challenges to illicit enrichment.
For this case study, Phillip Kagucia of Kenya’s Ethics and Anti-Corruption Commission (EACC) spoke to Andrew Dornbierer, Senior Asset Recovery Specialist and author of the Basel Institute’s open-access book Illicit Enrichment: A Guide to Laws Targeting Unexplained Wealth.
Open-access licence and acknowledgements
This publication is part of the Basel Institute on Governance Case Study series. It is licensed for sharing under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0).
Suggested citation: Solórzano, Oscar. 2022. “The Russian arms dealer case.” Case Study 4, Basel Institute on Governance. Available at: baselgovernance.org/case-studies.
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