Prominent businessman Patrick Bitature has built a habit of fighting his creditors and contractors on a technicality rather than the substance of what he owes them.
The technicality is almost always the same. He argues that the company or professional pursuing him for money is not properly registered or licensed in Uganda and therefore has no right to sue him at all.
Records from two separate cases in which Bitature is involved show this defence has been tried again and again.
In each case, the judges have eventually looked past the technical arguments and ruled on the actual merits of the dispute, often against Bitature or his allies.
The $10 million Vantage fight
The most high-profile of these cases involves South Africa’s Vantage Mezzanine Fund II Partnership, which lent $10 million to Bitature’s Simba Group in 2014.
The loan was supposed to be repaid starting in 2017. It was not, and the debt grew such that by 2022 auctioneers had advertised several of Bitature’s properties for sale, including Elizabeth Apartments in Kololo and Protea Hotel in Naguru, over what was then reported as a $32 million debt.
Bitature’s legal team resisted enforcement by arguing that Vantage was not registered as a partnership in Uganda and therefore had no legal standing to sue or to recover the money.
In May 2022, Justice Musa Ssekaana appeared to agree, ruling that Vantage lacked the capacity to sue because it was not duly registered in Uganda.
But that ruling did not survive scrutiny of the Court of Appeal, where a three-judge panel threw out the registration argument entirely in a ruling delivered in August 2025.
Justice Esta Nambayo, who wrote the lead judgment, argued that Uganda’s Partnership Act and Business Names Registration Act only require local registration for partnerships that have a physical place of business in Uganda.
A foreign fund lending money from outside the country does not fall into that category.
Justice Nambayo wrote that lending to a Ugandan company does not amount to carrying on business in the country, and that lending money without a physical address in Uganda does not create an obligation for a foreign lender to register locally.
Bitature’s second case follows an almost identical pattern, this time involving an architectural firm, Finicon, that did some work at his hotel and home in Kololo.
Finicon sued Bitature in December 2018, saying it had completed most of the contracted work, including feasibility studies, architectural drawings, tender documents and regulatory approvals, but had not been fully paid by Bitature.
In court, Bitature’s lawyers questioned whether Finicon’s own architects were properly registered with the Architects Registration Board, and whether the firm was recognised as an architectural practice at all.
They argued that one of the firm’s architects, Trevor Muhumuza, only registered with the board in December 2017, years after the contracts were signed.
The argument did not sway Justice Stephen Mubiru, who said that Finicon had substantially performed the work it was contracted to do, and that the registration status of individual architects could not erase Bitature’s obligation to pay for services already rendered.
Bitature was ordered to pay Finicon Shs 955 million, in addition to 9% annual interest from May 2014, along with the costs of the case.
Court orders Bitature to pay over Shs 2 billion to architects who designed his hotel, home
Taken together, the two cases show a consistent legal strategy employed by Bitature’s lawyers.
Rather than contest whether money is genuinely owed, the lawyers have always preferred to go after the identity or paperwork of the party making the claim.
They hope that the case collapses on a technicality before the real issues are even examined, something that judges are now wary of.
In the Vantage case, the Court of Appeal found the registration argument by Bitature’s lawyer, Fred Muwema, was based on a misreading of the law.
In the Finicon case, Justice Mubiru said the architects had done their work, so they had to be paid for regardless of the registration disputes.
For Bitature, the fact that courts are tearing through his “not-registered-in-Uganda defence” means the once reliable legal trick has run its course.
There is no place to hide.
