KAMPALA — A court summons over a single unpaid consultancy fee has thrown fresh scrutiny onto the supervision of the Namanve industrial park, Uganda’s flagship industrialisation project — dragging its supervisors before the Commercial Court and, with them, a paper trail that raises far larger questions about how their multibillion-shilling contract was won and priced.
The High Court’s Commercial Division has summoned PM Excellence (UK) Limited and MBW Consulting Limited — the joint venture serving as Owner’s Engineer at the Kampala Industrial and Business Park (KIBP) at Namanve — to file a defence to a claim brought by a firm called AD Concepts Limited, under Civil Suit No. HCT-00-CC-CS-0605-2026. On its face the case is a routine debt. What it forces into the open is anything but.
AD Concepts says the joint venture engaged it in April 2023 to prepare the bid documents, do the legal work and “facilitate the securing” of the KIBP supervision contract — for a fee of €800,000 (about UGX 3.5bn). The work was delivered, it says, the contract was won, and payment then fell due. Instead of paying, the joint venture negotiated a settlement, signed on 13 October 2025, that did three things at once. It cut the fee from €800,000 to €600,000 (about UGX 2.6bn). It made a first instalment of €320,000 (about UGX 1.4bn) payable by the end of that month. And it tied the remaining €280,000 (about UGX 1.2bn) to a single, improbable event: the joint venture succeeding in clawing back UGX 3.4bn that the Uganda Investment Authority (UIA) had withheld as value added tax — money owed to the revenue authority, not to anyone on this contract.
The sting sat in the tail. If the VAT was never released, the contract said, the UGX 1.4bn already paid would be “deemed the final payment,” and the balance would simply disappear. Stripped of the legalese, a fee for work already done was pinned to a wager — payable only if the joint venture won an argument with the taxman over money that was never its to collect.
And AD Concepts’ lawyers say the joint venture already knew the wager was lost. In correspondence, the firm’s counsel, GEM Advocates, contend that fifty-five days before the settlement was signed, the Solicitor General had written to UIA’s Executive Director raising substantive doubts about whether that VAT could ever be recovered. The joint venture, they argue, was holding that letter and said nothing — hanging a third of AD Concepts’ money on an outcome it had reason to believe was already dead. Counsel’s language is blunt: a condition impossible from inception, the concealment of a material fact, a fee structure built on “artificially created uncertainty.” These remain contentions in a civil suit yet to be tested, and the joint venture has not filed its defence.
It is the founding fee, though, that most unsettles procurement specialists. Money paid to help win a public contract — a commission, a success fee, a finder’s fee — is treated with deep suspicion under procurement and anti-corruption rules everywhere, because it is among the oldest ways known to inflate a public price, and where such payments exist at all they are meant to be declared in the open. Part of the AD Concepts fee was, on the documents’ own wording, for “facilitating the securing of the contract.” That is the exact shape of a success fee. Yet it arrived dressed as a consultancy fee for bid preparation and legal support. Bid work is legitimate; legal support is legitimate; a payment expressly tied to getting the contract awarded, and partly pegged to prising a tax refund out of the very authority that awarded it, is neither obviously one nor the other. None of this is proof of wrongdoing — a large consultancy fee can be exactly what it says — but the gap between the label and the work described is wide enough to walk through.
To understand why that gap matters, follow what happened to the supervisor that came before. When construction began, the park’s Owner’s Engineer was a consortium of two international firms, Roughton International and Turner & Townsend, working with the Ugandan firms Joadah Consult and Basic Group — a team chosen through open, competitive tender. UIA terminated that contract in August 2022. Publicly, the authority blamed the consortium, citing weak supervision and delays in clearing designs. The records reviewed for this article tell it differently: the termination, they show, was effected under the contract’s no-fault clause — a provision that lets a client simply elect to have the work done by others, with no finding of failure attached. On that reading, the “additional cost” UIA has since tried to recover, put at UGX 34.2bn and climbing, is not a loss caused by the sacked consortium but the price of the authority’s own decision to replace it.
The replacement was never competitively tendered. With roughly eleven months available to run an open procurement, UIA used a direct award — the very method the competitive rules exist to keep at bay, because with no rival bid to hold it down, the price is free to drift upward. PM Excellence entered not through the open process then running but through an unsolicited proposal championed within UIA’s top management, while established UK firms shortlisted by the British High Commission in 2019 — among them AECOM, Arup, Atkins and Mott MacDonald — were never even approached. The conditions the procurement regulator, the PPDA, attaches to any direct award — due diligence and a value-for-money assessment — appear not to have been satisfied before it went ahead. Within weeks of winning, PM Excellence formed its joint venture with MBW Consulting and handed operational control to MBW, hollowing out the very “British expertise” used to justify the award.
The arithmetic is where the case turns eye-watering. The predecessor consortium’s entire six-year, €8.8m (about UGX 38bn) engagement worked out to about UGX 510m a month before tax. The replacement’s cumulative UGX 34.2bn runs at roughly UGX 1.07bn a month, tax included — more than double the rate, for a mainly local firm that carries none of an international consultancy’s costs: no expatriate salaries, no airfares, no work permits, no overseas mobilisation. Closer up, it looks worse. The first ten-month engagement, at UGX 17.1bn, ran above UGX 1.7bn for each active month — more than three times the old rate. A lump-sum contract signed in February 2026 releases about a fifth of its value, some UGX 2.56bn, on the submission of a single inception report. And the headline UGX 34.2bn is itself four contracts stacked into one number — an initial deal, two addenda and the 2026 lump sum — the scope re-priced at every turn even as, UIA insiders have told local media, the park’s actual scope was being cut.
Then there is the firm itself. Corporate records show PM Excellence (UK) Limited was registered in 2017 with £100 in nominal share capital, two employees and a portfolio of jobs worth between $15,000 and $30,000 (roughly UGX 56m to 113m) — against a contract whose own terms demanded annual turnover of around €50m (about UGX 216bn). The distance between the firm and the job is not a step but a chasm. More seriously still, records reviewed for this article indicate that invoices submitted under the joint venture billed for staff who never worked on the project — names absent from attendance registers, meeting minutes and project files. A former project manager is said to have rejected those invoices; a successor is recorded as approving them after the first manager was removed. Monthly billing has been put at between $300,000 and $500,000 (about UGX 1.1bn to 1.9bn) for a locally-based firm. Each of those claims is checkable against attendance records, payroll and tax remittances and the payment file, which is precisely why they demand an answer rather than a shrug.
Here the documents fall silent and inference begins — and it should be read as nothing more. If winning this contract required a substantial success fee dressed as consultancy, the money had to come from somewhere. A lean consortium priced to win an open tender offers no room to bury such a cost; a directly awarded replacement, priced behind a closed door at double the going rate, has room to spare. The question the record raises but cannot answer is whether the competent, cheaper consortium was removed not because it had failed — the documents say it had not — but because its tight pricing left no space for whatever the arrangement that replaced it required. There are innocent explanations for every strand, and the parties are entitled to give them.
None of this sits in isolation. The Namanve project — financed by a €219.5m (about UGX 1 trillion) UK Export Finance loan signed in December 2019, and meant to turn a 1,000-hectare site east of Kampala into the centrepiece of Uganda’s industrial drive — is already years late and, at the last public count, around 60 percent built against a 2024 deadline. It has drawn the Inspectorate of Government, whose probe has ranged across UIA land deals, payroll and the very termination of the original Owner’s Engineer, and it has already produced one scandal over “honoraria” paid to UIA staff after that termination — payments that drew a refund directive from the investment minister, Evelyn Anite, and a summons from the President.
For a project built to advertise Uganda’s industrial ambition, the question the court file leaves on the page is the simplest one: how a supervisor with no international cost base, measured against international rates, came to cost the public more than double — chosen by handshake rather than auction, on a shrinking scope of work. No ordinary procurement rationale on the record so far explains it. The extraordinary ones are now for the High Court, and the investigators, to weigh. PM Excellence, MBW Consulting and UIA are each entitled to respond; the joint venture’s defence to the AD Concepts claim has yet to be filed.
