MONROVIA — A Monrovia criminal court has scheduled final arguments for Friday in the high-profile economic sabotage trial of former Finance and Development Planning Minister Samuel D. Tweah Jr. and four co-defendants accused of unlawfully disbursing more than US$6.2 million in public funds during the 2023 elections period, setting the stage for jury deliberations in one of Liberia's most politically charged corruption cases in years.
Criminal Court "C" at the Temple of Justice will hear closing arguments from both the Ministry of Justice and the Liberia Anti-Corruption Commission on one side, and a defense team that has spent months systematically dismantling the prosecution's case, on the other.
Also standing trial are former Acting Justice Minister Nyanti Tuan, former Financial Intelligence Agency Director-General Stanley S. Ford, former FIA Comptroller D. Moses P. Cooper, and former National Security Advisor Jefferson Karmoh. The defendants face multiple charges including economic sabotage, theft of property, misuse of public money, money laundering, criminal conspiracy, and illegal disbursement of public funds.
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Prosecutors maintain that the accused orchestrated unauthorized transfers of government money from state security accounts into operational accounts linked to the FIA. The defense has countered with a single, sustained argument: that the funds were legally allocated for sensitive national security operations during a tense electoral period and disbursed through channels shielded by Liberia's National Security Reform and Intelligence laws, which permit confidential expenditures outside ordinary procurement and disclosure requirements when national security interests are at stake.
The Audit Gap
One of the defense's most effective lines of attack throughout the trial has been the absence of a forensic or presidentially authorized audit before the indictment was drawn. Defense witnesses argued repeatedly that prosecutors built their case on assumptions rather than documented financial findings -- and that a proper audit would have identified what specific amounts, if any, each defendant allegedly took, rather than sweeping all five under a generalized US$6.2 million accusation.
Tuan pressed that point directly from the witness stand. "If we committed economic sabotage, we must benefit," he told the court. "The State has not shown how we benefited."
That argument gained traction during several stretches of the proceedings as defense lawyers pressed prosecution witnesses on documentation gaps, authorization chains, and inconsistencies in the account of how the transfers were structured and approved.
Karmoh Challenges Core of Prosecution Theory
A significant turning point came during the testimony of former National Security Advisor Karmoh, whose appearance directly undermined one of the prosecution's central pillars.
State lawyers had relied heavily on a letter authored by Karmoh, arguing it effectively admitted the FIA into a "National Joint Security" structure that prosecutors said facilitated the disputed transactions. Karmoh rejected that reading outright, testifying that "Joint Security" is a collaborative term used informally among existing security institutions -- not a legally established entity under Liberian law. He maintained that the FIA was already part of Liberia's broader security architecture and needed no formal admission into any framework. He further testified that all election-related security funding was approved through the National Security Council and disbursed through established government channels.
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Tweah Takes the Stand
The political temperature of the proceedings rose sharply when Tweah himself testified. The former minister rejected the corruption allegations and defended the disbursement process as lawful and necessary, insisting the Ministry of Finance acted within approved government mandates and that the funds were never under his personal control. His testimony reinforced the broader defense argument that prosecutors were recasting confidential security expenditures as ordinary public spending -- and criminalizing them accordingly.
The prosecution presented one regular witness and several subpoenaed witnesses before resting its case in April, reserving the right to present rebuttal evidence.
