Newly Appointed Minister of Finance Allegedly Took Over Le10 Billion From Finance Ministry Account

Bank statements of Sierra Leone’s Ministry of Finance show staggering details of direct cash withdrawals to the tune of Le10.25 billion cumulatively withdrawn by Sheku Bangura between 24th January 2019 and 23rd December 2020.

These transactions, totaling Le10,259,237,124.00, were withdrawn in 346 transactions from the Finance Ministry Account at the Bank of Sierra Leone (BSL). Records of the Finance Ministry’s transactions show that each cash withdrawal averaged about Le30 million. Africanist Press discovered that most daily cash transactions were in hundreds of millions and exceeded the usually authorized cash withdrawals by most government ministries, agencies and departments.

Africanist Press calculated 18 large transactions in October 2019 amounting to Le2.9 billion withdrawn between 2nd October 2019 and 31st October 2019. These multiple amounts ranged from Le50 million to Le250 million, and between Le400 million and up to Le500 million. We also discovered that these unusually large cash withdrawals were consistently carried out in ways that exhausted most of the disbursed funds into the Finance Ministry’s Account in 2019. In October 2019, for example, Africanist Press found that a total of Le2.9 billion in direct cash withdrawals were carried out by Sheku Bangura; these transactions constituted 75% of the Le5.09 billion cash withdrawals carried out by Bangura in 2019.

Africanist Press also observed similar pattern of cash transactions by Sheku Bangura in 2020 totaling Le 5,162,433,270.00; each transaction averaged Le42,315,026.80. We discovered that about Le3,826,251,840.00 representing 75% of these cash transactions were also carried out mostly in October and November 2020. These transactions amounted to about 54% of the Le9.4 billion in cash payments done by the Finance Ministry in 2020.