Koinange Family Wants Village Market, Tribe Hotel Demolished Over Land Ownership Wrangles

The Koinange family now wants Village Market and the Tribe Hotel shut down and made to pay them for damages.

The family has petitioned the High Court to demolish the building over claims that developers of the mall grabbed their land.

The mall is owned by Greenhills Investment which is associated with the Ehsami brothers.

They insist that the land was acquired fraudulently and as such they want the owners compelled to pay them damages for illegal occupation or compensation at the current market rates.

Greenhills acquired a KSh 8.5 billion loan from KCB Group which they used to develop the mall.

At the same time Greenhills insist that they are the legitimate owners of the land and has petitioned the High Court to enjoin the Land Registrar in the suit to indicate the owners of the property.

The company said it relied on the register and searches issued by the chief land registrar ahead of acquiring the prime land.

The investment company said they bought the seven-acre piece of land that was full of coffee bushes to develop the mall which is estimated to be worth over KSh 15 billion.

The high-end shopping complex, was built by Ahmed and Mehraz Ehsami who conceived the idea way back in 1992.

Village Market started off as a ten-shop establishment exactly 20 years ago now boasts 150 outlets on three levels, an outdoor food court and health and fitness centre.

Mehraz also designed Tribe, a five-star hotel adjacent to the shopping complex that has in the past hosted celebrities such as Angelina Jolie and Nicole Kidman.

Mehraz, an accomplished architect who was by then a lecturer at the University of Nairobi.

But due to delayed visas, their scheduled trip to Australia was never to be and family decided to stay on and try their hands at local business.

“We were just driving around when my brothers and I saw this place and thought we could set up a few shops and create a shopping centre that captures the concept of an African village, a market that brings people together and creates a setting for socioeconomic interrelations

“We bought the seven-acre piece of land that was full of coffee bushes. My elder brother designed it and three years later, we had 60 shops,” Hamed said in a recent interview with Nation.

Hamed graduated with a Bachelor’s degree in international business from the University of San Francisco.

He also has a Masters in Business Administration from the Iran Centre for Management Studies. 

His brother, on the other hand, is a British-trained engineer who taught architecture at the University of Nairobi before indulging in real estate.