I believe you can swap Taylor's name with Jammeh in the article below and
the article will still be true.

Regards,
MJohnson


How Charles Taylor Diverted $100m

Vanguard (Lagos)
NEWS
September 19, 2003
Posted to the web September 19, 2003
Monrovia

CHARLES Taylor, for six years the warlord president of Liberia, stole or
diverted nearly $100 million of his country's wealth, leaving it the poorest
nation on earth, a close review of government records and interviews with
senior government officials and UN investigators shows.

New York Times, quoting senior members of his government, said Taylor stole
millions to buy houses, cars and sexual partners. He illegally diverted many
millions more in government revenues to buy weapons in defiance of an
international arms embargo, fueling a futile civil war he started long ago,
UN investigators say.

The $100 million is an estimate of stolen and diverted government funds,
excluding graft from private enterprise, since 1999. The sum far exceeds the
amount of aid expected to flow to this ruined land in the foreseeable
future. Taylor started his presidency "just ripping stuff off," said William
Milam, US ambassador in Monrovia from 1995 to 1998. He ended it much the
same way. "You can safely say it was tens of millions," Alex Vines, who
worked as an investigator for the United Nations trying to enforce the arms
embargo against Liberia, said of the money Taylor diverted just from
donations made by foreign governments to pay for the disarming of his
militias in his final days in office.

The embargo "failed miserably, with devastating human consequences," Vines
said. But the UN investigation that followed Taylor's departure last month
began to document that failure by following the money. Taylor's flight
allowed former senior members of his government to speak freely with a
reporter, detailing what UN investigators also described. These officials
included Taylor's finance ministers and the governor of Liberia's Central
Bank, as well as Western diplomats, American officials, and Monrovian
bankers, shippers and civil servants. .Much of the money came from a
shipping network, set up by the United States at the dawn of the Cold War to
protect American military and economic interests, that Taylor took control
of in 1999, interviews and government documents showed. The bottom line for
Liberia is clear. Liberia's government revenues totaled more than $200
million during Taylor's last four years in power. At least half that money,
possibly more, has vanished.

"The revenue base was largely diverted," said Nathaniel Barnes, Liberia's
finance minister from September 1999 to July 2002. "I think the original
intent was for the quote-unquote war effort. But there was no kind of
accountability."

"The fundamental problem," he said, "was the leadership's inability to
transform from warlord to statesman." In the 1980s, before he was president,
Taylor was a senior government procurement officer. His sticky fingers
earned him the nickname "Superglue." Indicted for embezzling nearly $1
million in 1983, he fled. Arrested in Massachusetts, he escaped jail in 1985
and disappeared. He resurfaced in Liberia in 1989 as a Libyan-trained
warlord, leading a rebel force.

The first seven years of the war that he started killed about 150,000 and
drove hundreds of thousands into exile. Taylor and his allies "didn't care
how many bodies they had to crawl over to get to the cash box," said Nat
Richardson, a former director of Liberia's state mining company. The war
ended, temporarily, when Taylor was elected president in 1997, in a fair
vote colored by fears of what might happen if he lost. Legislators and
ministers alike say now that they rarely dared question his conduct in
office. As president, Milam said, Taylor showed himself to be "primarily
avaricious, trying to put his hands on every loose piece of change and every
resource he could find." Then, in 1999, Taylor put his hands on a unique
resource: the Liberian maritime registry system. Liberian registry was
created by the United States in 1948, primarily to benefit Americans. The
flag of convenience lets American shippers hire crews outside American wage
and labor laws; the ships can be reflagged and made available to the US
military in times of war. The registry covers a third of the world's
shipping tonnage, more than 1,700 vessels. It generated a steady flow of
revenues, averaging about $18 million a year, to Liberia's Bureau of
Maritime Affairs in the 1990s. It has no responsibility for what happens to
the money once it reaches Monrovia. In 1999, Taylor fired the Virginia
company that had run the registry for 50 years and set up a new one a few
kilometers away. Within weeks, he was using registry revenues to buy
weapons. He took the money from the source," said Chauncey Cooper, a former
Liberian diplomat turned journalist and shipping company director. "And he
used the money at will."




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Copyright © 2003 Vanguard. All rights reserved. Distributed by AllAfrica
Global Media (allAfrica.com).
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