President William Ruto has assented to the Trust Administration Bill, 2026, ushering in the most significant overhaul of Kenya’s trust law in nearly four decades. The new Act repeals the Trustees Act (Cap. 167) and the Trustees (Perpetual Succession) Act (Cap. 164), replacing a fragmented, decades-old framework with a single statute governing the creation, registration, administration and dissolution of trusts.
The reform was necessitated by a structural weakness that regulators had flagged for years: Kenya’s trust law did not compel disclosure of who ultimately benefits from, or controls, a trust. Trusts were governed mainly by the Trustees (Perpetual Succession) Act, which did not make it mandatory to disclose beneficial owners, leaving room for such vehicles to be used for money laundering and terrorism financing. This gap took on added urgency after Kenya was grey-listed by the Financial Action Task Force in February 2024, following a 2021 mutual evaluation by the Eastern and Southern Africa Anti-Money Laundering Group that found compliance gaps, including on beneficial ownership of trusts. Opaque trust structures have long been a favoured vehicle internationally for concealing illicit wealth behind layers of legal ownership, precisely the kind of case the FATF standards target.
To cure this, the Act introduces a national Register of Trusts under a designated Registrar, and compels every trust, existing or new, to maintain and lodge a register of beneficial owners, including settlors, trustees, enforcers and beneficiaries. Existing trusts have a 24-month transition window to comply. The law also tightens fiduciary standards, codifying trustees’ duties of care, loyalty and record-keeping, introduces licensing-style qualification and disqualification criteria for trustees, and creates offences and administrative penalties, some running into millions of shillings, for false filings or non-compliance. Notably, information collected will be shared with competent authorities, including the Central Bank, the Financial Reporting Centre and the Kenya Revenue Authority, positioning the register as an active investigative tool rather than a passive archive.
Reception has been broadly supportive on policy grounds, with commentary framing the Bill as long overdue modernisation that aligns Kenya with jurisdictions such as the UK and EU member states that already run beneficial-ownership registries for trusts. Legal practitioners, however, have flagged practical friction points: the compliance burden on family and testamentary trusts, the interplay between disclosure obligations and the Data Protection Act, and the cost of retrofitting older, informally administered trusts to meet the new registration and record-retention standards. For fund managers and institutional trustees, the practical task ahead will be operational: mapping beneficial ownership data across existing structures well before the 24-month compliance clock runs out. (Start your investment journey today with the cytonn MMF, call+2540709101200 or email sales@cytonn.com)
