Diamond Trust Bank Kenya has completed the sale of its entire 83.67% shareholding in Diamond Trust Bank Burundi S.A. to a consortium of primarily Burundian investors, the bank confirmed in a public announcement dated 28 March 2026.
- •The transaction closed on 31 December 2025, following receipt of all necessary regulatory approvals from the Bank of the Republic of Burundi.
- •With that, a regional presence that began in 2009, when Diamond Trust Bank became the first Kenyan lender to establish operations in Bujumbura, came to a formal end.
- •The transaction was initiated by the minority shareholder, understood from previous regulatory filings to be Unik Investment S.A., the Burundian investor vehicle controlled by Shafiq Jiwani, which sought to consolidate its position in the subsidiary.
DTB established the Burundi subsidiary as a greenfield operation in 2009, anchoring an initial 67.34% stake then valued at KSh 262.9 million, alongside the International Finance Corporation at 16.33% and Burundian investor vehicle Unik Investment S.A. at the same proportion. The Abu Dhabi-based Al Bateen Investment Company, originally allocated a matching 16.33% slice, did not take up its stake.
Over the following decade, DTB deepened its commitment rather than trimming it: in 2018 it bought out the IFC for KSh 152.2 million, lifting its holding to 83.67% and bringing its total recorded investment in the subsidiary to KSh 636.9 million by end of 2024. That buyout, at the time, looked like a vote of confidence in Burundi's long-term trajectory.
By the financial year ended December 2024, DTB Burundi was contributing just KSh 50.6 million to the group's consolidated profit before tax, a collapse of 56% from the KSh 115 million it generated the prior year. The subsidiary's total assets had contracted from KSh 5.9 billion to KSh 4.6 billion over the same period, a balance sheet shrinkage of more than KSh 1.3 billion in a single year.
The operating environment provided no grounds for optimism: Burundi was running inflation of approximately 39% in 2025, driven by a chronic shortage of foreign exchange and widespread fuel scarcity, conditions that structurally compress lending margins and erode deposit stability for any bank, but particularly for a foreign-anchored subsidiary without the scale to absorb prolonged macroeconomic stress.
Group CEO Nasim Devji, speaking at the time of the September 2025 cautionary announcement, described the buyers as committed to maintaining the bank's financial inclusion mandate under consolidated local ownership, and characterised DTB as leaving behind a stable, well-governed institution. The sale price was not publicly disclosed. Given a subsidiary generating under KSh 51 million in pre-tax profit against KSh 4.6 billion in assets, implying a pre-tax return on assets of barely 1.1%, the absence of a disclosed price is itself a notable gap in the public record, one that makes independent assessment of whether DTB extracted fair value on its KSh 636.9 million investment impossible without further disclosure.
The strategic rationale for the exit is nonetheless coherent. Diamond Trust Bank Kenya now operates a three-market footprint, holding 67.18% in Uganda and 65.68% in Tanzania alongside its dominant Kenyan franchise, which reported a consolidated net profit after tax of KSh 7.64 billion for FY2024, up from KSh 6.88 billion the prior year.
Shedding a subsidiary that was consuming regulatory capital and management attention while generating returns that were both small in absolute terms and deteriorating in direction is a defensible allocation decision, particularly for a group that has room to deploy capital more productively in its core markets.
