This week the outlook for Koko Networks’ creditors worsened again. In July, administrators and liquidators for the embattled Kenyan climate technology company opened a formal search for buyers of its ethanol cooking technology, a stove and canister factory in India and its fuel distribution platform. They were seeking bidders able to complete a deal worth more than $15m, in an attempt to salvage value for creditors from one of Africa’s highest-profile climate technology failures. The company’s UK arm has since failed to find a buyer for its carbon credits at a fair price, leaving creditors expecting little or no recovery as it winds down.
FirstRand Bank, which is owed $60m, and other unsecured creditors owed about £126m ($167m) expect to recover nothing without a sale, and the UK company holds under £280,000 in cash. The cause of the collapse is usually given as one decision by the Kenyan government. A second regulatory matter, which the generally published account omits, was also running. It concerned a contentious contract at the centre of Koko’s distribution network, and it was argued in a courtroom at the Milimani Law Courts, just west of Nairobi’s central business district, shortly before the company stopped trading.
The first problem
Koko sold ethanol fuel and stoves to low-income households at prices it could not sustain on its own sales. By selling cookstove credits abroad, it subsidised the fuel at home, making it cheaper than charcoal and kerosene. Selling into compliance markets such as the aviation industry’s offsetting scheme required a letter of authorisation from the Kenyan government, which triggers an adjustment to the national emissions inventory so reductions are not counted twice.
The government declined to issue the letters, and Trade Secretary Lee Kinyanjui said Koko had sought to claim Kenya’s entire carbon credit allocation, which would have locked out other local firms. More than 700 employees were laid off on 31 January and PwC’s Muniu Thoithi and George Weru were appointed joint administrators the following day.
The contract
The second problem is older. On 18 April 2018 Koko signed a 10-year wholesale concession and operating agreement with Vivo Energy Kenya, the distributor of Shell-branded fuel. Under the arrangement announced that July, ethanol cooking fuel was stored at Vivo depots and service stations fitted with Koko’s systems, and Vivo’s contracted tanker operators delivered it to Koko’s fuel dispensers in neighbourhood shops.
Some terms, including exclusivity, were potentially anti-competitive under Kenyan law. In March 2019 the Competition Authority of Kenya granted the parties a five-year exemption for them. The exemption covered only half of the agreement’s term, and it lapsed on 28 March 2024.
According to court papers, that was where the parties’ accounts diverged. Koko says its US-born president, Mathew Schiller, told the court that the company had been buying from other suppliers since 2021, so exclusivity had not operated even while it was exempt. Vivo told Koko in February 2024 that it would not seek renewal. Vivo told the Authority in November 2024 that the clauses were redundant and being removed, and a signed amendment reached the Authority on 4 March 2025. It stated that the deletions took effect from 27 March 2024, the day before the exemption lapsed.
The Authority’s position is that nothing amending the agreement had been lodged by the lapse date, and that the clauses’ continued presence afterwards was a preliminary breach of section 21(1) of the Competition Act.
The inquiry
In October 2024 the Authority carried out surveillance in eight counties. It concluded that Vivo was Koko’s exclusive supplier and that Koko was maintaining resale prices through its “KOKO Cloud” platform. In other words, the Authority alleged that Koko could buy its fuel from only one supplier and that the shops selling it to households could not set their own prices, an arrangement that, if proved, would have kept rival suppliers out of the market and removed price competition at the point of sale. On 15 April 2025 it sent both companies a Notice of Proposed Decision setting out the alleged breaches and inviting representations.
Koko disputed the substance. It argued that it retained title to its fuel throughout, meaning its agents were not independent resellers and that it could not fix prices “against itself”. On Koko’s account, the shops handling its fuel acted as its agents rather than as buyers who resold it. The price they charged households was therefore Koko’s price for its own product, not a price agreed between competitors — a distinction the court did not decide. Koko also argued that the notice relied on unnamed vendors and sales representatives who misunderstood its business. A hearing took place on 22 September 2025. On 3 October, the Authority rejected Koko’s preliminary objection that it should have been told about the investigation and shown the evidence before the notice was issued.
The inquiry overlapped with Koko’s financing. In March 2025 the World Bank’s Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency insured Koko’s investment for $179.6m. The judgment does not say whether Koko’s backers knew of the inquiry or took it into account.
The ruling
Koko sought a High Court order to quash the notice and stop the investigation. It argued that the Competition Tribunal, which would ordinarily hear its grievance, had no quorum. According to court papers, Koko learned on 21 January that the Tribunal’s chairperson’s term had expired, and it filed its motion on 26 January, days before the company stopped trading.
Justice Aburili accepted that the High Court could hear the case. On the merits she ruled against Koko:
- Notice of intention to investigate. She held that the word “may” in section 31(4) of the Competition Act makes a notice discretionary, and that Koko had not proved a settled practice that would create a legitimate expectation of one.
- Surveillance report. She distinguished investigation, where confidentiality is permitted, from adjudication, where the material relied on must be disclosed. The notice, she found, set out the findings in enough detail for Koko to respond, and a court would not ordinarily compel a regulator to hand over raw surveillance.
- Timing. The notice was not a final decision and Koko had been offered a hearing, so the application was premature. Each side was left to bear its own costs.
The judgment decides none of the underlying questions. It does not say whether the clauses were in force after March 2024, whether an amendment backdated by a day could cure a breach, or whether Koko’s agency argument is sound. It records no final decision under section 36 of the Act, and I found no public report of one. The judgment also does not say what penalty the Authority could impose.
What the Exclusivity Case Reveals
Neither the Authority nor the government has linked the competition case to the carbon-credit dispute, and the court was not asked to do so. The record supports a narrower conclusion: Koko’s financial model depended on two separate state decisions — one on carbon authorisation and another on the lawfulness of its main supply arrangement — and the second remained unresolved when the first went against the company.
Koko’s own evidence points to the financial pressure created by both. Mr. Schiller told the court that the company risked insolvency if the Authority imposed financial penalties based on a report it had not seen. The motion was filed after the carbon-credit refusal, when a shutdown was already imminent, so the court’s account does not establish which dispute weighed more heavily on the company. The carbon decision is the one the government and administrators have identified as the trigger for the collapse.
The competition case nevertheless illustrates a tension at the heart of many climate-tech business models in emerging markets. Scaling often requires supply-chain certainty, distribution reach and commercial arrangements that can later attract regulatory scrutiny. Koko’s exclusivity arrangement with Vivo Energy gave it the fuel supply and distribution backbone needed to expand rapidly. But after the exemption expired, the same arrangement became the subject of a competition investigation.
The High Court did not determine whether the exclusivity arrangement was ultimately in breach of the Competition Act. Its ruling was narrower: the Authority’s investigative process had not violated Koko’s right to fair administrative action, and the notice of preliminary determination was not itself a final decision. In court, Koko argued that it could not properly answer allegations based on a report it had not been shown. The judge held that the Authority’s disclosure was sufficient at that stage. That contrasts with the carbon-credit decision, where several senior officials declined to explain why the relevant letters were not issued until after Koko had closed, before Mr. Kinyanjui subsequently addressed the issue.
The exclusivity arrangement, therefore, did not cause Koko’s collapse. The carbon-credit refusal did. But the competition case formed part of a wider regulatory exposure that made an already fragile business model harder to sustain. Koko was dependent on carbon-credit revenue that required government authorisation while simultaneously operating under an exclusive supply arrangement that had attracted the competition regulator’s scrutiny. When the first regulatory assumption failed and the second remained contested, the company had little room to absorb the resulting financial and legal uncertainty.
That is the broader lesson from the case. For the Competition Authority, the judgment affirms that an investigation can remain confidential and that fair administrative action does not necessarily require pre-decision disclosure of every internal working document. For climate-tech companies, the case shows the other side of that principle: business models built around regulatory permissions — whether for carbon credits, market access or exclusive supply arrangements — can carry risks that are difficult to price until an approval is withdrawn or a commercial structure is challenged.
By the time the High Court ruled in April 2026, Koko had already been in administration for nearly three months. For a business that once served 1.3 million households and employed about 700 people, its collapse leaves a gap in Kenya’s clean-cooking market and a more difficult question for the climate-tech sector: how can companies build the scale needed to make clean technologies commercially viable when the regulatory permissions underpinning their revenue and distribution models can themselves become sources of risk?
What remains
Koko’s Kenyan company is now facing liquidation after administrators failed to find buyers for its key assets. A further affidavit sworn on 23 February by Mr. Weru, one of the joint administrators, carried Koko’s arguments against the Authority forward, but the judgment does not address how the competition inquiry fits into the insolvency process or whether any liability arising from it could follow the company’s assets into liquidation.
The World Bank guarantee, which covers breach of contract, was designed to protect against political risk. Business Daily reported that the Kenyan government could face a compensation bill of about Sh23bn under it, and that Kenya’s response to a claim would probably rest on concerns about the volume of credits Koko sought to sell. Whether a claim has been filed is not public.
The Authority, Vivo and Koko’s administrators have not said whether the competition inquiry is continuing, and the judgment gives no date for a final decision.