MONROVIA – Former Minister of Finance and Development Planning Samuel D. Tweah, Jr. has written a sweeping thirteen-page missive to United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres and the wider international community, laying out what he describes as a systematic and politically motivated campaign by President Joseph Nyuma Boakai’s Unity Party government to weaponize Liberia’s judiciary against key figures of the preceding Weah administration — and, more urgently, to overturn a jury verdict of acquittal rendered in his favor on May 8, 2026. Tweah, acquitted alongside former Financial Intelligence Unit Comptroller Moses D. Cooper on charges stemming from the legal transfer of $6.2 million in national security funds during the 2023 general elections, accuses the government of influencing three minority jurors to file post-trial affidavits alleging jury misconduct — a maneuver he says bears all the fingerprints of executive desperation ahead of the 2029 presidential election cycle. THE ANALYST reports.
A Free Man Who May Not Stay Free
Dated June 12, 2026, and simultaneously addressed to African Union Chairperson Evariste Ndayishimiye, ECOWAS Chairman Julius Maada Bio, European Council President António Costa, and key congressional leaders in the United States, the letter carries the weight of a man who believes his freedom is under renewed threat.
Tweah writes that he “stands ready to bear any consequence” for resisting what he terms a politically manipulated post-verdict process and declares that he would “not honor any politically manipulated process that aims to subvert justice.”
The acquittal itself was the culmination of a trial that began in earnest in March 2026 following a Supreme Court ruling in December 2025 that remanded the case to Criminal Court C after a 2024 prohibition by defense counsel had briefly suspended proceedings.
The original indictment, handed down in July 2024, charged Tweah and four co-defendants with crimes including economic sabotage and criminal facilitation for the legal approval of national security expenditures during the election period.
Tweah argues forcefully that those transfers were not only legally authorized under the Public Financial Management Law of Liberia but were consistent with a long-standing pattern of similar executive transfers to entities ranging from the National Elections Commission to the World Food Program and the UN Population Fund — transfers totaling billions of dollars across his six-year tenure as Finance Minister.
The Government’s Star Witness Collapsed Under Scrutiny
Tweah’s letter devotes significant attention to the evidentiary failures of the prosecution. The government’s principal witness, Baba Borkai of the Liberia Anti-Corruption Commission, could produce no documentary proof of wrongdoing, Tweah noted.
Instead, the former Finance Minister said, the witness relied on what he characterizes as “assumptions, conjectures and educated guesses.”
The prosecution’s theory—that the absence of a written request letter from the Financial Intelligence Unit constituted proof of theft or misappropriation — was effectively dismantled when Tweah took the witness stand.
He demonstrated to jurors that the Minister of Finance is authorized under statute to disburse funds to spending entities under national security or exigent circumstances without a written request, and that the passage of the national budget itself constitutes the authorizing signal for such disbursements.
Nine of the fifteen empaneled jurors voted for acquittal. Three voted guilty. One defendant, former Financial Intelligence Unit Director General Stanley Ford, received a hung verdict, while former Acting Justice Minister Cllr. Nyanti Tuan and former National Security Advisor Jefferson Kanmoh were convicted on two charges apiece. Tweah notes pointedly that national celebrations erupted upon his acquittal, reflecting public awareness that he — the financial architect of the Weah administration — was the government’s primary target.
Government Panic: Three Jurors File Post-Disbandment Affidavit
What followed the verdict, Tweah alleges, was a textbook exercise in executive manipulation. Ten days after the jury was disbanded — and after the government had publicly embraced the verdict at a Ministry of Justice press conference framed as a triumph for Liberian democracy — three of the guilty-voting jurors filed affidavits alleging jury misconduct or tampering.
Tweah further argues the timing alone is dispositive: had those jurors genuinely witnessed misconduct, they would have complained immediately, while still under court protection and in the presence of presiding Judge Ousmane Feika, who had throughout the trial maintained exemplary impartiality.
“If no other juror could complain of jury misconduct immediately after the verdict, the jury forewoman should have complained,” Tweah writes, noting that the forewoman — who voted guilty on all charges — was herself in court when Judge Feika instructed him and Cooper to “go home as free men.”
The Defense Counsel filed a motion on May 20 to ensure the subsequent investigation proceeds consistent with due-process protections under Articles 20(a) and (b) of the Liberian Constitution, a principle that Justice in Chamber Yussif D. Kaba affirmed through a stipulation signed by both Prosecution and Defense. Tweah says the prosecution’s continued resistance to an open-court investigation betrays an intent to hide, not reveal, the truth.
Three Rule-of-Law Flashpoints Cited in the Letter
The missive situates the post-verdict maneuver within a broader pattern of executive contempt for judicial authority, citing three precedent-setting episodes. First, the Boakai government’s outright defiance of a Supreme Court ruling that conferred legitimacy upon Speaker J. Fonati Koffa against the so-called Majority Bloc of the House of Representatives: the government continued to conduct financial business with the rogue bloc in open defiance of the court’s opinion, a development Tweah says has chilled Liberia’s investment credibility. Second, the government’s removal of officials at autonomous agencies — including the Governance Commission, the Liberia Telecommunications Commission, and the Liberia Anti-Corruption Commission — in direct contradiction of a Supreme Court ruling from April 2024 holding that fixed-tenure appointees cannot be removed at presidential pleasure where statute specifies removal grounds.
Third, and most directly analogous to Tweah’s situation: the government’s disbanding of a jury in the Capitol Building fire case involving former Speaker Koffa and members of the legislative Minority Bloc.
The prosecution ordered the jury disbanded on grounds that jurors were asking questions the government interpreted as signs of impending acquittal. Tweah draws an explicit parallel — asking whether the government only cries jury misconduct when it is losing, and whether it is now poised to deploy the same playbook against the jury that freed him.
A Second Case Looms: Rice Subsidy Transfers Now Under Scrutiny
The letter does not end at the verdict fight. Tweah discloses that even as celebrations over his acquittal were ongoing, the government moved to identify a second case: the legal approval and transfer of government resources under a rice importation subsidy program in 2021, designed to cushion the impact of Covid-19-era freight cost spikes on staple food prices.
The program was conducted in consultation with the International Monetary Fund under Liberia’s IMF External Facility arrangement. Tweah says he has already appeared before the Government’s Asset Recovery and Property Retrieval Task Force to provide answers and maintains he had no role in the expenditure of the funds once disbursed to the Ministry of Commerce and Industry, as the Public Financial Management Law assigns accountability for expenditure to spending entities.
“As Finance Minister, I oversaw financial transactions totaling over $3 billion for six years,” he writes, adding archly: “Maybe the Government intends to invite me for questioning on all these approvals. There is no clearer and better evidence of witch-hunt anywhere the world over.”
Civil Society Mobilizing; International Pressure Demanded
Tweah’s letter details the voices that have publicly condemned the government’s conduct: the Student Unification Party at the University of Liberia, the rights-based advocacy group STAND — which plans a major protest on July 17, 2026 — ANC political leader Alexander Cummings, and Liberia’s People Party Standard Bearer Cllr. Tiawan Gongloe, a prominent human rights lawyer. Tweah reserves his sharpest language for the international community itself, arguing that the gains won through two decades of post-conflict democratic consolidation are being eroded in plain view while external partners attend to other preoccupations.
“Prevention is cheaper than resolution,” Tweah writes, in a formulation that echoes the language of the peacebuilding community.
He urges ECOWAS, the United Nations, the African Union, the European Union, the United States Government, and multilateral institutions including the World Bank, the IMF, and the African Development Bank to end what he calls a “deafening silence” and to engage the Boakai government directly over the deterioration of the rule of law.
He warns that a government which interprets the political opposition’s restraint — born of respect for the trauma of Liberia’s civil wars — as a license to intensify its abuses is misreading a situation whose mismanagement carries potentially catastrophic consequences for national stability.
Whether the international partners to whom the letter is addressed will act remains to be seen. But the letter marks a significant escalation by a senior opposition figure who, having been acquitted before twelve of his countrymen, is now appealing to the court of world opinion — and signaling that he intends to resist, openly and at whatever personal cost, any attempt to undo that verdict.