19/09/2025
Battle of titles: Tycoon's daughters deepen puzzle on prime beach land
BY SG
A fresh storm is brewing over a prime 53-acre beachfront estate in Msambweni, Kwale County, after revelations that the property has two conflicting title deeds.
At the heart of the dispute is a city lawyer Guy Spencer Elms and accountant Nileshkumar Mohanlal Shah, whose ownership claim was revoked by the Lands ministry last year, only for a January court order to renew the contest.
According to the ministry, Spencer and Shah presented a disputed title deed for the land that is owned by late Pritam Singh Panesar.
will carrying signatures said to be inconsistent with the late billionaire’s known hand. In the contested will, DCI forensic document examiner Alex Mwongera compared the signature on against that on Panesar’s national identity card, and concluded the two did not match.
Panesar died in July, 2018, leaving behind a vast estate stretching from Nairobi to the Coast, a fortune that has been at the centre of legal battles.
While the daughters claim in their newspaper statement that the will has never been challenged, court filings and forensic reports point to ongoing disputes over its authenticity.
Three men, Mohammed Ruwa Maridadi, Anthony Michael Mwanza Mulwa, and Ahmed Ouma Randa, are also fighting over the prime beachfront parcel of land, which they claim to have acquired rights over through adverse possession.
That claim, however, was quashed in court after Spencer and Shah applied to set it aside on grounds that they were the duly appointed executors and trustees of the estate, yet they were never joined in the original case.
Maridadi, Mulwa, and Randa had argued that they had lived on the land for over 12 years, and asked that the title be transferred into their names.
As the competing claims persist unresolved, the Panesar succession battle appears far from over
