Quality officer at energy company charged with forging degree certificate

A former Geothermal Development Company (GDC) employee who used a forged degree certificate to secure employment as a quality assurance officer with the corporation is facing charges of forgery for making the document without authority.

Desmond Robins Mulama had worked with the state corporation for nearly 14 years after securing the job as a quality assurance officer before he left in February 2024.

Mr Mulama resigned from the GDC after the Public Service Commission (PSC) asked the Directorate of Criminal Investigations (DCI) to investigate academic documents of all members of the staff at the GDC.

The suspect now faces charges of making a document without authority contrary to section 337 (a) of the Penal Code.

He is accused of making a certificate for a Bachelor of Technology in Electrical and Communication engineering purported to have been issued by Moi University which is not offered at the varsity.

Moi University told the DCI, during the investigations, that Mr Mulama had not obtained the degree there after it was told to confirm the authenticity of the degree.

The prosecution says the degree certificate that Mr Mulama presented to GDC was made at an unknown place in the country on October 10, 2011, and the suspect made it knowing the same was false.

Mr Mulama is also accused of uttering a false document contrary to section 353 of the Penal Code where he is accused of presenting the forged degree certificate at the GDC offices in Nairobi on October 10, 2011.

He is accused of knowingly and fraudulently submitting the fake certificate to the human resources manager purporting it to be a genuine document issued by Moi University.

Mr Mulama denied all the charges before senior principal magistrate Robinson Ondieki of the Milimani Law Courts.

Mr Ondieki will set bail and bond terms for the suspect on September 24.

The DCI visited the corporation during investigations to verify documents used by all employees during the recruitment and discovered that 64 certificates submitted by the employees were fake.

The investigators had started by writing to the Kenya National Examinations Council (KNEC) and institutions of higher learning to obtain records of employees.

They later visited the corporation’s offices and obtained individual employees’ files.

Interestingly, the company had done a verification of the documents presented by its staff during the recruitment in a verification exercise conducted between 2017 and 2022.