Contracts awarded in Liberia violate law: Audit

The Liberian government awarded about USD 8 billion in contracts to multinational companies without following its own laws, according to a draft of a new audit that reviewed dozens of deals.
Critics say the way the government granted concessions for timber, mining and oil exploration has allowed the companies to benefit at the expense of the West African nation still recovering from civil war a decade later. It was not immediately clear how those contracts the audit found to be improper might be affected.
Alfred Brownell, who serves on the board of the national resource transparency watchdog that ordered the audit, said late yesterday that only two of the 68 contracts reviewed were found to be in compliance with Liberian law.

"In Liberia we have a history of how resources have fuelled conflicts," he said. "If you don't put in place the appropriate governance mechanisms to ensure that our resources will be awarded transparently... We will continue to have these same kind of issues."
Liberian Information Minister Lewis Brown today said that the audit report being circulated was only a draft, and that the auditing firm had yet to issue its final evaluation.
"The report proceeds to confirm a lot of things we already are aware of and have begun to take some steps," he told The Associated Press.

Brownell, an environmentalist and board member for the Liberia Extractive Industry Transparency Initiative (LEITI), estimates that the hasty and inappropriate awarding of concessions to multinationals covers USD 8 billion. That's about half of the direct foreign investment Liberia has attracted since 2009 under the government of President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf.

Despite its poverty, Liberia is rich in timber and companies are also conducting oil exploration projects. Activists have raised questions, though, about how the growth is impacting the country.
Last year, Global Witness documented how so-called "private use permits" have enabled logging companies to claim over 40 per cent of Liberia's forests in just two years.
The three-month audit was conducted by the UK-based accounting and auditing firm, Moore Stephens. It was hired by the Liberian government through LEITI, which is jointly run by the government and non-governmental organisations.