Global Policy Forum

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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