Two Mombasa-based billionaire families have emerged as the biggest winners in the just ended government subsidy on maize. Fears are rife that the importers may have rushed to ensure the imported maize landed – but not distributed to millers, before the subsidy window closed to maximize profits. The amount of maize imported by the millers is less than a tenth of the cumulative shipments in the May to December period. Most of the importation, which is highly capital intensive, was however done by two major commodity trading families. Little is publicly known about ETC, owned by the Export Trading Group, despite being among the biggest players in commodity trading.

Source: Standard Digital January 21, 2018 06:33 UTC