Since you seem very curious about this whole Liberia cash transport saga, I will make a few remarks.

This practice of the Liberian central bank shipping fresh dollar notes into Accra & then flying the package into Monrovia for deposit into their vaults under Police escort is as controversial in Liberia as it is in Ghana. Always has been.

This is not Liberian currency minted in London being flown into Liberia via Ghana. These are United States Dollar banknotes. Liberia can’t print those. No one except the US can. So, where exactly are these dollars from?

The Liberian central bank explains the practice by claiming that the fresh cargo of dollars is meant to replace old and mutilated USD currency notes. They claim that they send the old/defaced USD notes to the US Federal Reserve (the equivalent of a central bank in the US). The Federal Reserve then replaces the dirty and mutilated notes with fresh currency and sends them over to Liberia.

The confusion is that there is a number of steps and middlemen involved that add a real layer of confusion. In the recent past, the central bank moved funds from multilateral banks to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York (FRBNY), one of the branches of the Federal Reserve. FRBNY was then instructed to pay a private cash broker, such as Travellex. Travelex receives the transferred amount plus its fees for doing this whole thing for Liberia.

Travelex then flies the physical money using normal cargo services (like Emirates this time, or Kenyan Airways in 2019). The money is offloaded into vaults at the Bank of Ghana. A few days later, it is lifted by another cargo plane to Monrovia and then escorted by Police into the vaults of the Central Bank of Liberia.

How much does the Bank of Ghana get paid for this “overnight custody” role? Why is this overnight custody required? Since the cargo flights used are not some specialised “air bullion” services that only fly to Accra, what specific value addition is offered by the Bank of Ghana’s “overnight custody” service? Why doesn’t the central bank of Liberia utilise a cargo service that flies from the source of the USD straight to Monrovia?

At the heart of the controversy is the seemingly ad hoc nature of this Liberian arrangement. The United States is very strict about the repatriation of old USD banknotes and the export of fresh ones. It has a program called the “Extended Custodial Inventory (ECI) Program”. Only authorized ECI contractors participate in this program. These contractors are all banks or major financial services players like American Express. The vaults they use for this banknote export and import are strategically located in major global financial centres, including London, where this $20m consignment came from.

In 2004, there was a big scandal when an ECI contractor, a big Swiss Bank, exploited the ECI program to supply physical cash from Zurich to some countries under US sanctions. Since then the US Federal Reserve Board has tightened the program further.

The question then is: did the central bank of Liberia use an authorised ECI vault in London to release the dollars to the cargo transporter? If it did, how come the specific Bank is not identified but only the freight forwarder, IBI Logistics?

How come there is no record of the mutilated/old/dirty dollars being flown out from Liberia for replacement? Why does Liberia pay the full face value of the dollars to private brokers like Travellex? And why do the private brokers never identify on the cargo manifest? Why is the 4907 HS Code never used to ensure a more accurate description? Why are the latest FATF recommendations on the customs declaration of imported banknotes not being observed? Etc.

Considering that the Federal Reserve Bank of New York has now streamlined the whole wholesale banknote distribution program with the introduction of the “Foreign Bank International Cash Services Program”, why doesn’t Liberia take advantage of this directly instead of this whole cloak-and-dagger model involving various brokers and their commissions it is currently using? And why is Ghana stuck in the middle of the chain as a transhipper?

In short, until more credible and comprehensive information is provided by the Liberian central bank to clarify these confusions, its continued transhipment of USD through Accra will not stop raising eyebrows, certainly not in Liberia. After all, it is Liberian citizens paying these brokerage fees and commissions.

Hope this clarifies things for you.