FAKE: This letter from Kenya Revenue Authority to Deputy President William Ruto is fabricated
A purported demand letter from the Kenya Revenue Authority (KRA) addressed to Kenya’s Deputy President (DP), William Ruto, is FAKE.
The letter was shared on Facebook and contains KRA’s branding. It purports that the Authority has not received any tax returns from Ruto other than his mandatory income tax as the DP.
“In light of recent revelations of your various commercial ventures, the KRA has taken this opportunity to review and restructure your tax obligations. Your poultry farming enterprise for instance as reported by yourself in media interviews generates a daily income of Kshs 1,500,000 sums of which you remit not access to the KRA,” reads the letter in part.
The letter adds that tax body officials have scheduled to visit Ruto on 6 September 2021, to discuss the composition of his new income tax structure.
The letter went viral after Interior Cabinet Secretary Fred Matiang’í, in a submission to parliament following summons, revealed properties owned by Ruto.
The document has also been shared here, and here. In a rejoinder, Ruto confirmed that some of the properties listed by Matiang’i are his.
However, there is no information about the letter on the KRA’s website, its Facebook, or Twitter pages.
In a Facebook post on 3 September 2021, KRA disowned the letter and asked members of the public to ignore it.
PesaCheck has looked into a letter shared on Facebook, purportedly written by the Kenya Revenue Authority and addressed to Deputy President William Ruto, and finds it to be FAKE.
This post is part of an ongoing series of PesaCheck fact-checks examining content marked as potential misinformation on Facebook and other social media platforms.
By partnering with Facebook and similar social media platforms, third-party fact-checking organisations like PesaCheck are helping to sort fact from fiction. We do this by giving the public deeper insight and context to posts they see in their social media feeds.
Have you spotted what you think is fake or false information on Facebook? Here’s how you can report. And, here’s more information on PesaCheck’s methodology for fact-checking questionable content.
This fact-check was written by PesaCheck fact-checker Simon Muli and edited by PesaCheck chief copy editor Rose Lukalo.
The article was approved for publication by managing editor Enock Nyariki.
PesaCheck is East Africa’s first public finance fact-checking initiative. It was co-founded by Catherine Gicheru and Justin Arenstein, and is being incubated by the continent’s largest civic technology and data journalism accelerator: Code for Africa. It seeks to help the public separate fact from fiction in public pronouncements about the numbers that shape our world, with a special emphasis on pronouncements about public finances that shape government’s delivery of Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) public services, such as healthcare, rural development and access to water / sanitation. PesaCheck also tests the accuracy of media reportage. To find out more about the project, visit pesacheck.org.
PesaCheck is an initiative of Code for Africa, through its innovateAFRICA fund, with support from Deutsche Welle Akademie, in partnership with a coalition of local African media and other civic watchdog organisations.