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LIBERIAN BANKNOTE SCHEME REVEALEDFrom the "want-another-$100-million-with-that?" department: We previously discussed Alves Reis, "The Man Who Stole Portugal" with his audacious 1920s con scheme in which he fooled a banknote printer into believing he was an authorized government official. They delivered to him a batch of freshly printed unauthorized but otherwise 100% genuine banknotes. This story from Liberia describes a similar scheme involving the son of a Liberian official and a supersized order of freshly-printed banknotes. -Editor
Liberian police on Monday formally charged the 61-year-old son of the country's former president, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, in connection with the unlawful overprinting of local currency worth millions of U.S. dollars. Separately, police also opened an investigation into the death of a central bank official. According to the charge sheet shared with The Associated Press by police, Charles Sirleaf and others, including former Central Bank governor Milton Weeks, face a multitude of charges, including economic sabotage, the misuse of public money and criminal conspiracy. Their arrests came after a government report and a separate U.S.-commissioned report pointed to the mishandling of billions of Liberian dollars in local banknotes. According to the U.S.-backed report, Liberia's central bank unlawfully ordered three times the number of bank notes it had been authorized to print, money that it can't wholly account for. Sirleaf was a deputy governor at the country's central bank during the period when the bank notes were unlawfully ordered. Sirleaf has denied any wrongdoing. The U.S. Embassy in Monrovia commissioned the probe by the U.S.-based firm Kroll Associates following reports in August that about $100 million worth of Liberian bank notes had disappeared — an amount equal to nearly 5 percent of the West African country's GDP. Kroll said its investigation found no evidence of a large shipment of cash going missing as had been reported by local media. Instead, the new bank notes are said to have arrived from a Swedish company but the central bank then failed to properly track what was done with them. The report said most of the bank notes are believed to have been put into circulation without authorities removing and destroying the old bills they were designed to replace. To read the complete article, see:
Dick Hanscom forwarded this BBC News article. -Editor
The son of Liberia's ex-President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf has been charged with economic sabotage in connection with the unlawful printing of local currency worth millions of dollars. To read the complete article, see:
Wayne Homren, Editor The Numismatic Bibliomania Society is a non-profit organization promoting numismatic literature. See our web site at coinbooks.org. To submit items for publication in The E-Sylum, write to the Editor at this address: whomren@gmail.com To subscribe go to: https://my.binhost.com/lists/listinfo/esylum All Rights Reserved. NBS Home Page Contact the NBS webmaster 
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