Central bank deputy governor Charles Sirleaf and director of banking Dorbor Hagba were arrested on Thursday while the bank’s former head, Milton Weeks, turned himself over to the police on Friday, police spokesman Moses Carter told dpa.
The three accused are yet to be charged, according to Carter.
The arrests were made in connection with a recent report by forensic auditing firm Kroll Associates, which possibly implicates the three men in the disappearance of freshly printed banknotes worth 16.5 million dollars between July 2016 and April 2018.
The U. S. Embassy in Liberia had requested Kroll to investigate the matter after Liberian media in 2018 reported that a container filled with new banknotes printed abroad had “gone missing’’ upon arrival in the West African nation.
Kroll said on Thursday it found “no information to support the allegations,” implying the money must have gone missing after its safe arrival.
The report identified “systemic and procedural weaknesses’’ at the central bank as well as weak fiscal and monetary management processes.
Until recently, the central bank had insisted that all printed notes were safely secured in the bank’s vaults.
It had been widely reported that shipping containers full of banknotes had vanished from Monrovia’s port and airport. However the report did not find any proof that this happened.
Instead, it 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 authorised to do.
According to Kroll, the House of Representatives passed a resolution for the order of 5bn Liberian dollars to remove and replace old banknotes on the market.
The Central Bank requested additional 10bn Liberian dollars but the request was denied by the Senate. The bank went ahead anyway and engaged a company to print the additional banknotes.
“CBL (Central Bank of Liberia) management subsequently explained to Kroll that due to the urgency for new banknotes, the CBL did not follow its own internal tendering policies for the procurement of Crane AB,” the report says.
Kroll explains in the 67-page report that, despite repeated requests, the bank did not provide any explanation as to who had approved the injection of new banknotes into the Liberian economy without first removing the equivalent quantity from circulation.
