From Vantage to Finicon: a decade of Bitature’s payment disputes

Kampala, Uganda — Patrick Bitature has spent much of the past decade in courtrooms, and more often than not the subject has been money. This week brought the latest instance, when the High Court ordered the businessman to pay a consultancy firm $256,136 — about Shs954 million — for work he commissioned years ago on two projects that never got off the ground.

The Finicon ruling is small compared with what came before it. But set alongside the other disputes that have followed Bitature through the years, it forms part of a longer, familiar story — one that is worth telling in full, and with an eye to his side of it, because these things are rarely as simple as a headline number.

2014: where it begins

The starting point is a loan. In December 2014, South Africa’s Vantage Mezzanine Fund II advanced $10 million to Bitature’s Simba Properties Investment Company to help fund expansion in real estate and hospitality, secured against some of his prime Kampala assets, including the Protea by Marriott Skyz Hotel in Naguru, and guaranteed personally by Bitature and his wife, Carol.

Around the same time, Bitature engaged Finicon to design a boutique hotel and remodel a home in Kololo. Both arrangements would, eventually, find their way into court.

2017–2019: when things stalled

Repayment on the Vantage loan did not go as planned. The lender says the term ended in 2019 with nothing repaid, and that interest and penalties eventually carried the figure past $34 million.

Bitature has never disputed borrowing the money, and his explanation is worth hearing. He has spoken of a three-year repayment freeze, of delays to Uganda’s oil investment decisions that upset his plans, and then of the pandemic, which he says “crippled cashflows” across his businesses. His companies, he has maintained, were not insolvent so much as caught out by circumstances and in need of time to recover.

2021–2023: the dispute grows

When the two sides could not agree, the matter went to arbitration in London. In 2023 the International Chamber of Commerce ordered Bitature, his wife and their companies to pay a total of $65.7 million, with Bitature personally liable for $25.4 million. At home, his companies went to court to hold off the sale of the mortgaged properties, at one point questioning whether Vantage could sue at all given that it was not registered in Uganda. Vantage, understandably frustrated, felt the process was being stretched out longer than it needed to be.

2025: the courts weigh in

Last year the decisions began to favour the lender. In August 2025 the Court of Appeal found that Vantage could enforce the loan without registering locally. Not long after, Bitature was granted some relief when the Supreme Court, through Justice Elizabeth Musoke, paused enforcement on 2 October 2025 while it considers his appeal. That case is still open, and how it ends is genuinely not yet clear.

2026: back to Finicon

Which returns the story to where it quietly started, years earlier. On 18 August, Justice Stephen Mubiru ordered Bitature to pay Finicon the outstanding $256,136, together with nine percent interest running from May 2014 and the costs of the case. The firm said it had completed most of the design work on the two Kololo projects and was owed the balance after receiving just $23,538. Bitature’s position was that the contracts were too unclear to enforce, and that the payment he had made settled things.

The judge saw it differently. He pointed to shifts in how Bitature described the payment — instalments at one moment, a lump sum at another — and concluded that signing a city-authority application and accepting the drawings pointed to work that had, in fact, been approved.

Keeping it in perspective

It would be easy to read all this as a simple tale, and it isn’t one. Bitature is not a man in ruins. He remains one of Uganda’s most recognisable entrepreneurs, with businesses spanning telecoms, energy, property and media, and he has consistently described his disputes as honest disagreements over terms rather than any reluctance to meet his obligations. He still has appeals running, the Vantage matter among them, and he is entitled to challenge the Finicon judgment too.

What can fairly be said is that money owed has been the recurring theme of a difficult decade — from a large foreign loan to a modest local bill — and that, so far, the courts have tended to land on the other side of the argument. How the remaining cases turn out may yet soften that picture.

By the time of writing, neither Bitature nor the Simba Group had commented on the Finicon ruling.