Prosecution presents evidence of Taylor’s secret bank account, final version of TRC report released

Two interesting Liberia updates from the news today:

First, the prosecution finally found one of Charles Taylor’s secret bank accounts, and presented it as evidence this week.  The account received $3.5 from Taiwan and $2 million from Natura Holdings (Gus Kouwenhoven’s company), among other deposits.  Here’s an excerpt from an article on this:

Taylor – who has always claimed that “no one, no human being has ever come up and said, ‘Here is a bank account with a million dollars belonging to Mr Taylor’” – acknowledges the existence of the account at the Liberian Bank for Development and Investment, but rejects prosecutors’ suggestions that he used it to hide illicit funds. It was a “covert account opened up by the Government of Liberia during this period, to fight our war”, Taylor told the court.

Second, the TRC released their final consolidated report. Kate Thomas has an article on VOA, noting that this report differs from the unedited one in that there are 10 more people listed as “most notorious perpetrators”  and 5 new people listed under the economic crimes category.  The “most notorious perpetrators” list now includes John T. Richardson, Benoni Urey, and Bell Dunbar (former head of the LPRC).

The VOA story quotes Jerome Verdier, head of the TRC, saying that there is in fact another volume of the final report that has not yet been released:

“There is a volume four, which is also unpublished, for the same reason that we do not have time and resources,” he said. “Volume four contains 10,000 pages of transcripts from the hearings of the TRC, the hearings for victims from all around the country and then the hearings in Monrovia which brought together war veterans, politicians and all of that, and then the hearings in the diaspora.”