Revenue assurance is now synonymous with crony capitalism across much of Africa following a series of controversies about the way governments award contracts and the enormous profit margins gifted to the foreign corporations that receive them. Liberia’s national revenue assurance contract for the monitoring of telecoms traffic is the latest to fall under the microscope after President Joseph Boakai (pictured) ordered its immediate suspension.
Liberia’s national RA contract was awarded in 2018 by the Liberia Telecommunications Authority (LTA), the country’s telecoms regulator. It was won by a previously unknown business that called itself Telecommunication International Alliance (TIA). Per the President’s order, it has been revealed that TIA only became a legal entity when it was incorporated in the US state of Delaware four days after it received the bid documents from the regulator. A corporation to perform the revenue assurance service was only established in Liberia at a much later date, 10 months after TIA won the contract from LTA.
Executive Order 154 was issued on October 31. It refers to numerous other signs of corruption:
- TIA’s bid asked them to be paid 35% of the value of the traffic they monitored, but they were granted 49% of the revenue at the time the contract was signed.
- The duration of the contract with TIA was later extended by an additional 20 years.
- An audit by Liberia’s General Auditing Commission found that the contract contained ‘irregularities’.
- An investigation by the Liberia Anti-Corruption Commission found that the contract was awarded to TIA contrary to the recommendation of the Public Procurement and Concession Commission.
- The Liberia Anti-Corruption Commission also questioned why the contract would have been awarded to a business with insufficient technical and financial qualifications for the work.
Liberia’s national RA system came into service in 2013. It was implemented under a five-year deal with Global Voice Group (GVG), who were required to hand over control at the conclusion of the contract. GVG are the pioneers of a conception of ‘revenue assurance’ that is only ever sold directly to governments, and where the amount they are paid is a guaranteed percentage of the value of the traffic being monitored, instead of being a fixed fee or a portion of the incremental value added. In 2017 it was reported that the Liberian government had also ordered the examination of GVG’s contract to determine if it involved any illegal activity.
GVG have engaged the services of one the UK’s most notorious law firms and threatened to sue Commsrisk for publishing numerous corruption allegations surrounding their national RA contracts. It is fair to observe that GVG is a firm that often needs the help of lawyers and manipulators of public opinion. For example, their lawyers continue to pursue the government of Guinea through a US court over Guinea’s refusal to honor a contract that was agreed with a short-lived military dictatorship which murdered and raped its own people. GVG founder Laurent Lamothe, formerly the Prime Minister of Haiti, a failed nation dominated by gangsters, is not allowed to enter the USA because of his involvement in corruption, although Lamothe disputes the US government’s claims. The USA is not the only country that has sanctioned Lamothe but you may not be able to find the full story for yourself if his lawyers have done an effective job in the place where you live.
The Roman poet Juvenal asked “who will watch the watchmen?” and this question remains as difficult to answer today as it was when Juvenal first posed it, over 1,900 years ago.
