The police in Liberia have charged Charles Sirleaf, son of the country’s former President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, over unlawful overprinting of local currency worth millions of US dollars.
A court in the capital, Monrovia, on Monday remanded him in prison pending the scheduling of the trial.
The 61-year-old was a former deputy governor of the Central Bank of Liberia.
The court heard that between 2016 and 2018, Mr Sirleaf “purposely with wicked and criminal intent connived and conspired with other officials” to print local currency, allegedly pocketing some of the proceeds.
Judge Kennedy Peabody said Sirleaf would be charged “with the commission of economic sabotage, misuse of public money, property or records and theft and or illegal disbursement and expenditure of public money and criminal conspiracy.
“Charles Sirleaf and his accomplices Milton Weeks and Dorbor Hagba, including defendants Richard Walker and Joseph Dennis who are at-large, are criminally liable [for] … Liberian dollar banknotes brought into the country which cannot be accounted for by them.”
Defence counsels did not make a public statement about the charges.
Liberia’s President George Weah expressed appreciation to the country’s partners, especially the United States, for helping with the investigation.
Mrs Sirleaf was recently in Nigeria as head of the ECOWAS election observation mission team during the presidential and National Assembly elections in February.
