Grand Cape Mount County senator and a prominent lawyer, and Chair of the Liberian Senate Judiciary Committee has been sanctioned by the United States Department of Treasury.
This followed a damning report by United States Department of Treasury
on senator Sherman in which he offered bribes to multiple judges associated with his trial for a 2010 bribery scheme.
The U.S. Treasury said the senator has had an undisclosed conflict of interest with the judge who ultimately returned a not guilty verdict in July 2019.
Sherman has routinely paid judges to decide cases in his favor, and he has allegedly facilitated payments to Liberian politicians to support impeachment of Justice Kabina Jan’neh who has ruled against him.
According to the Treasury release, in the 2010 scheme that led to this trial, Sherman was hired by a British mining company in an effort to obtain one of Liberia’s last remaining mining assets, the Wologizi iron ore concession.
Sherman advised the company that, in order to obtain the contract, they first had to get Liberia’s procurement and concessions law changed by bribing senior officials.
In 2016, Sherman was indicted by the Liberian government, along with several other government officials, for their involvement in the USD 950,000 bribery scheme while in 2019, the presiding judge acquitted all individuals accused of being involved in the bribery scheme.
Sherman’s acts of bribery the treasury Department said demonstrates a larger pattern of behavior to exercise influence over the Liberian judiciary and the Ministry of Justice.
He is designated for being a foreign person who is a current or former government official responsible for or complicit in, or directly or indirectly engaged in, corruption, including the misappropriation of state assets, the expropriation of private assets for personal gain, corruption related to government contracts or the extraction of natural resources, or bribery.
The report is part of International Day of Ant-corruption intended to raise public awareness for anti-corruption initiatives, which has been observed annually on December 9 since the United Nations General Assembly adopted the United Nations Convention against Corruption (UNCAC) on October 31, 2003.
The latest sanction means Senator Varney Sherman 67, will not be allowed to travel to the united states and all access owned by him in relation to the U.S. has been blocked.
