High profile bankers in Liberian including the son of ex-president, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf have been charged with economic sabotage.
Charles Sirleaf, a former deputy governor of the Liberian central bank and four others were charged in connection with what prosecutors say is unlawful printing of local currency worth millions of dollars.
The arrests and announcing charges against these individuals followed the release of a report into the missing banknotes two weeks ago.
The investigation was launched into the missing banknotes last year after news broke of the disappearance of huge consignments of the money printed abroad in China and Sweden.
Officials were unable to account for the missing consignments containing the banknotes. They were brought into Liberia between November 2017 and August 2018.
Although the containers, the money was kept inside left the port in the capital, Monrovia they could not be found.
Report findings
The investigation was conducted by investigative auditing firm Kroll.
The firm sought to investigate the alleged disappearance of the over $100million worth of banknotes.
It had been widely reported that the shipping containers full of the banknotes had vanished from Monrovia’s port and airport.
But the report according to the BBC did not find any proof that this happened.
The investigators however found that Liberia’s Central Bank had acted unilaterally and unlawfully by printing and importing into the country three times the amount of banknotes it had been authorized to do.
Hundreds of Liberians protested expressing anger at the development and launched a campaign dubbed “bring back our money”.
It forced the government to launch an investigation into the missing banknotes with some officials banned from traveling abroad.
Charles Sirleaf was among those the ban affected.
President George Weah took over last year promising to deal with corruption and fix the country’s ailing economy.
Source: Africafeeds.com
