Google Kenya head claims she ‘decided to leave’ in wake of Mocality scandal

After initial reports that she had been fired, Google’s Kenya head Olga Arara-Kimani now claims she left the internet-giant of her own accord.

Kenyan tech-news blog Nairobitech was the first to report that Arara-Kimani had been fired over the Mocality scandal.

The scandal, which saw the Naspers-owned business directory accusing Google of illegally scraping its data, gained worldwide attention from the likes of The Register,Techcrunch, Boing Boing, The NextWeb, PaidContent, and Slashgear. Some wondered how damaging the scandal would be to Google’s “Do no evil” corporate mantra.

Arara-Kimani’s alleged firing would seem to be in line with the comments made in a recent post that appeared on Google’s VP for the Europe, Middle East, and Africa region Nelson Mattos’ Google+ page:

We’ve concluded our investigation into the serious allegations about our use of data from Mocality’s website in Kenya. We’re very sorry this happened. We’ve taken appropriate action with the people involved and made changes in our operations to ensure this doesn’t occur again.

In the wake of Nairobitech’s story, however, Kenyan Newspaper Daily Nation reported that Arara Kimani had sent them a text message stating that the decision to leave Google was hers alone.

The message read: “I confirm I have left Google Kenya. As the leader of the Kenya office, I felt that the buck stopped with me and I decided to leave.”

When approached about the matter, Google’s head for Sub Saharan Africa, Joe Mucheru reportedly said that “It’s a private matter between Olga and Google.”