Pat Robertson and Liberia

[Joanne98]

The Amos Sawyer article I discuss in the previous post alerted me to the fact that US Christian evangelist Pat Robertson had business interests in Liberia while Charles Taylor was president. I decided to do a little digging. Here's the gist of the story.

About one week after 9/11, Colbert King wrote a column in the Washington Post on Pat Robertson's involvement in a gold-mining venture in Liberia. King wanted to show the hypocrisy of Robertson's claim that the US was attacked on 9/11 because of American self-indulgence and purusit of financial gain. King writes:

But in May 1999, Robertson, through Freedom Gold Limited , an offshore company registered in the Cayman Islands but based at CBN headquarters in Virginia Beach, signed an agreement with Taylor and key cabinet members allowing the for-profit Freedom Gold to explore and receive mining rights in southeastern Liberia, where gold is believed to be in the ground.
King wrote that, "Liberia -- and for all practical purposes we're talking Taylor -- gains 10 percent ownership of Freedom Gold." Robertson took issue with this. In a letter to the editor, Robertson wrote:

Freedom Gold is an exploratory company engaged in digging holes in the ground for the purpose of discovering commercial grade ore. It has no cash flow, and, therefore, there are no profits to its shareholders and none to anyone else. According to its mining concession, Freedom Gold will make available to the Government of Liberia sometime in 2004 to 2006 shares which will be illiquid until such time as the company is taken public. No cash flow is forecast for the company until at least the year 2004 or beyond.
In the letter Robertson comes off as quite the Taylor sympathist, referring to Taylor's "alleged nefarious activities," arguing against sanctions on Liberia, and asking the US to consider that Liberia could return to war if Taylor is pushed out. (How wrong you were, Robertson.)

Robertson is probably right that the Taylor government was not profiting in any legal way from Freedom Gold in 2001, but that seems beside the point. To get the contract, Freedom Gold probably had to offer some type of kickback to the government. And as Robertson admits in the letter, Liberia stood to gain royalties likely around 2004. In 2001 Liberia, I would argue it was not ethical to be doing business in the country. Taylor's nefarious activities were not "alleged," but rather widely known and documented.

http://allabuja.blogspot.com/2009/04/televangelist-pat-robertson.html

That would make Pat Robertson a war criminal too.