Phone firm CEOs warned of arrest over unlisted lines

Four mobile phone company bosses have been warned that they face arrest for allowing phones with unregistered SIM cards to make calls and send messages using their companies’ networks.

The warning came as it emerged that the police are trying to trace the telephone numbers they suspect were used by terrorists who killed 67 people during last month’s attack on the Westgate shopping mall in Nairobi.

The police and the Communications Commission of Kenya (CCK) on Monday said the four top executives risk arrest for the sale of pre-activated SIM cards.

Already, some of the companies’ agents have been arrested for selling SIM cards without first registering them as required by law. CCK and police officers have since Sunday been carrying out investigations across the country into the sale of the pre-activated SIM cards. According to CCK, all four operators have been caught on the wrong side of the law.

“Even the CEOs of these companies are criminally liable and they will be arrested. There is no doubt about that. A law has been broken and they have to face the consequences,” Dr Fred Matiang’i, the Cabinet Secretary for Information, Communication and Technology told a press conference on Monday. He was with the Inspector-General of Police, Mr David Kimaiyo and CCK director-general Francis Wangusi.

Safaricom, whose CEO is Mr Bob Collymore, is the largest mobile telephone operator in the country. The others are Orange Telkom, led by Mr Mickael Ghossein, Airtel, whose managing director is Mr Shivan Bhargava and yuMobile under country manager Madhur Taneja.

According to data CCK released on Monday, there are 684,139 unregistered subscribers who are still active. Airtel and yuMobile are responsible for 385,267 and 298,872 subscribers respectively.

Although information indicates that both Safaricom and Orange have no unregistered SIM cards on their networks, the government has cast doubt over the accuracy of these figures and is carrying out an audit of all operators to ensure that they have submitted correct statistics.

“Clearly, it looks like the companies may not have acted as truthfully as they were expected to do but before we accuse them, we are working with the regulator to review the regular reports they have submitted,” he said.

In a telephone interview with the Daily Nation, Mr Collymore said CCK had dispatched an official to audit Safaricom records to ensure that the subscriber numbers tallied with those submitted to the regulator.

“We don’t think we have any unregistered SIM cards operating on our network. It should be impossible to make a call on our network if a SIM card is not registered,” he said.

Orange said that it had not “received any communication from the regulator” on the matter and would be unable to comment.

yuMobile and Airtel did not respond to queries by the Nation.

The operators were on Monday given 48 hours to deactivate all unregistered SIM cards on their networks and to ensure that none of their agents sells un-registered SIM cards. Agents who have been caught selling pre-activated SIM cards may face a jail term of three years or a fine of Sh300,000.

SIM card users will be required to report the loss of a card to the police before activating a new one. This can be used to exonerate the user from any criminal activities that may be carried out using the lost SIM card.

Dr Matiang’i said criminals obtain SIM cards without registration and use them to engage in “all manner of crimes”.

“We cannot get hold of these criminals as fast we could if these SIM cards were registered,” he said. “It is a requirement of the law that all SIM cards should be registered so that we know who the owners are. And it is important that we pay attention to this because it has very serious security implications.”

The crackdown on operators comes in the wake of the terrorist attack on the Westgate Mall, in which more than 70 people died. According to witness accounts, some of the terrorists made calls using their mobile phones during the attack. Mr Kimaiyo declined to shed light on whether the police had retrieved the phone records of the terrorists.

“We might not release the information at the moment because it might jeopardise the investigations we are carrying out,” Mr Kimaiyo said.

The drive to switch of unregistered SIM cards was launched by the government last year amid increasing reports of crimes perpetrated by anonymous mobile phone subscribers. According to Mr Kimaiyo, these crimes include fraud and the demand of ransom by kidnappers. Some of the calls were traced to Kamiti Prison inmates.

The deadline for deactivating unregistered SIM cards was December 31, 2012. However, mobile operators had until the end of March, 2013 to ensure that there were no unregistered SIM cards operating on their networks.