A secret audio recording has helped a former senior manager at Craft Silicon’s ride-hailing arm, Little Cab, win a landmark KSh98 million court award after a judge ruled he was unfairly dismissed and denied a promised equity share of the company.
- •The Employment and Labour Relations Court found that Ronald Otieno Mahondo, who served as Little’s first General Manager, was wrongfully terminated in 2017 in an attempt to block him from benefiting from a 1% ownership stake he had been offered when he joined the startup.
- •Justice Mathews Nduma ruled that Mahondo’s secretly recorded conversation with Craft Silicon CEO Kamal Budhabhatti in which the executive acknowledged granting him the 1% stake proved his claim beyond doubt.
- •Justice Nduma awarded him KSh 1.02 million for unlawful termination and USD 750,000 (about KSh 97 million), the value of his 1% stake based on the company’s USD 75 million valuation.
“The claimant was victimised in an effort to conceal the fact that he had been awarded 1% shareholding,” the judge said in the October 23, 2025 judgment.
Mahondo joined Little in April 2016 as General Manager, earning KSh 240,000, which was later raised to KSh 340,000. He was tasked with building the new taxi-hailing venture from scratch. In exchange for his role in establishing the business, he was allegedly promised equity—an increasingly common incentive in Kenya’s tech startups. He claimed that Craft Silicon offered another 1% share if he grew the company further and made it a successful going concern.
Within a year, Little had expanded rapidly, with Mahondo crediting his team for helping grow the firm’s book value to over USD 300 million. But when he asked for a written copy of his employment contract, which he had signed but never received a counter signed copy showing the share award, relations with management soured.
In his defence, Craft Silicon CEO Budhabhatti had said that Mahondo had been "casual, careless and unsystematic in his management" of suppliers, did not get along with colleagues, and that the salary increment was "merely administrative and not purely based on the claimant's performance." He added that the former executive had been found guilty of gross misconduct but Little had decided to terminate his employment 'normally' and paid him KSh 633, 737 as a severance.
Mahondo said that due to his insistence on being given a copy of his contract, he began receiving performance memos and disciplinary notices before being dismissed in May 2017. "This litany of adverse letters to the Claimant in a short space of one month corroborates the Claimant’s evidence that he began to be threatened and harassed upon insistence on being given a copy of his contract that had awarded him1% of company shares," Justice Nduma said.
Sensing an unfair process, Mahondo recorded several meetings, including one with Budhabhatti acknowledging the share promise. The court admitted the recording as valid evidence under Kenya’s Evidence Act, describing it as “credible, consistent, and verifiable.”
The court also noted that Budhabhatti had not directly addressed the 1% share claim, and did not contradict the evidence that the other Little director, who is his wife, engaged in "persistent abuse, harassment, threats and promise of termination of employment."
