Published: July 26, 2026
MONROVIA – Ibrahima Traore says he took the president’s son to Madrid. He also says he has never spoken to him.
Both statements were made in the same telephone interview with The Liberian Investigator, roughly two minutes apart.
Ibrahima Traore, the businessman whose photograph appears in a video of masked, armed men demanding the release of a cocaine consignment seized at Duazon, told this newspaper he personally arranged a trip to the Real Madrid Foundation and brought along Joseph Nyuma Boakai Jr., the president’s son, together with Liberia’s youth and sports minister and a Liberian ambassador. “That was my first, even my first relationship,” he said, “to see and Jojo and travel together and go see that people.”
Minutes later, pressed on the video’s claim that he was the man who introduced the traffickers to the younger Boakai, Traore said: “I never talked with Jojo ever in my life. Ever. Ever in my life.”
That contradiction sits at the center of a larger question this newspaper set out to answer over several record checks: who is Ibrahima Traore, and does the business empire he has spent two years describing to Liberians actually exist?
There is a real company. There are real government contracts. Around that small verifiable core sits a vast claim of mining operations, energy megaprojects, sports diplomacy, and cross-border investment vehicles that leave almost no trace in any official register this newspaper could reach.
The video
Days after security forces seized cocaine at Duazon, a video began circulating on Liberian social media. Masked men speaking with foreign accents issue threats against the government. Behind them, taped to a wall, is a photograph of Joseph Nyuma Boakai Jr., known as Jojo, beside a number the men present as his WhatsApp contact. Next to it is a photograph of Traore shaking hands with President Boakai, whom they identify as the person who introduced them to the president’s son. They demand the return of their cocaine and of US$2 million they say was paid to Boakai Jr. and other officials.
None of those claims has been established. The men are unidentified. The video is an allegation made by masked men with an obvious motive to spread blame.
But it put a face on a wall, and that face belongs to a man who has been introducing himself to Liberian ministries, football authorities and newspapers, including this one, as an investor.
Traore denied all of it. He said the men never named him, that he had not seen the portion in which his photograph appears, and that he has lived in Spain for nearly 27 years without ever handling drugs. “It’s a big lie,” he said. “My bill is clean. I’m not worried about anything because I don’t know anything.” Investigators examining the seized suspects’ phones, he said, would find neither his picture nor his number. “If I were into drugs, I would have done it when I was in Spain,” he told The Liberian Investigator.
The interview ended in some disorder, a woman he identified as his wife interrupting to tell him to stop speaking. He had been asked, moments earlier, a simpler question. Where is your office in Monrovia? He never answered it.
A screenshot of the video of masked individuals purporting to be owners of the seized drugs demanding the drugs, their money, and making threats at the President’s son
What can be proven
Zoom Network Inc. is real, and its dealings with the Liberian state are documented in primary records.
Liberia’s electronic procurement system shows that the company participated in Ministry of Finance and Development Planning processes and was awarded contracts. A bid-opening report from June 16, 2025, lists it as a bidder for rice and oil, with its address given as Front Street, MIC Building, Montserrado, Monrovia. A contract award notice from August 4, 2025, names Zoom Network Inc. as the best evaluated bidder for the supply and delivery of foodstuffs at US$107,100. A bid-opening record from May 13, 2026, again lists it at the same address, bidding on rice and palm oil, and an awarded contract listing from June 26, 2026, records US$51,265 for a palm oil lot.
“We gave rice to the Minister of Finance,” he said. “Because they wanted rice, we took rice from some company and gave to them. And when they pay us, we pay the people and get our benefits.”
Pressed to describe the nature of his business in Liberia, he said, he often looks for investors in areas where the government needs investment and then bring those investments to Liberia to help the government. Asked whether that made him essentially a broker, he agreed. “Yes, something like that.”
It is a fair description. It is also a long way from the man on his own biography page.
Asked directly which investors he had actually brought to Liberia, his answer was: “From the beginning, I bring some people. It didn’t work,” he said. “The time I bring some people, it never works.” He mentioned Italian contacts he hoped might refurbish hospitals in the country. He said he had met with the Minister of Health and who has given him the “paper” for the contract. Then he said this.
“I’m trying to do my own thing too in the country to make money.”
What cannot
That biography, published on the website of Underground O&D International Corp., presents Traore as a Madrid-based executive holding, simultaneously, the chief executive’s post at Zoom Network and at Sarpoe Construction, the presidency of Econemix Group Inc., the co-chairmanship of ALFA Gold Inc., the vice presidency of Malaikah Energy Group and the chief executive’s post at Sports World Africa Europe SL in Spain. It describes him as special adviser to Sheikh Moustapha Kouyateh, Liberia’s former ambassador-at-large for special duties, and lists a Madrid degree, representation of players in La Liga and Major League Soccer, and negotiated contracts exceeding 20 million euros.
For Sarpoe Construction, Econemix Group Inc., ALFA Gold Inc. and Malaikah Energy Group, this newspaper found no Liberia Business Registry extract, no concession instrument, no mining licence, no official filing of any kind. For Sports World Africa Europe SL, no Spanish registry extract surfaced. Absence from a search is not proof a company does not exist. It does mean that six of the seven executive titles Traore claims rest on nothing but his own website.
The only entity independently verified is Underground O&D itself, and this verification offers little reassurance. Florida’s Division of Corporations lists it as an active profit corporation filed on April 14, 2021, at 7259 Via Genova, Delray Beach, with Luis O. Alvarez serving as incorporator, registered agent, and president. Its website describes it as a United States company licensed to trade oil and derivatives. However, the Florida filing reveals no such license, no regulator, and no license number. Alvarez appears in Florida records connected to a group of other small entities, including International Commodities Holding Corp and Atella Corp, both of which have been administratively dissolved. This is the corporate structure behind a man introduced to Liberians as an international investor.
Zoom Network’s profile shows similar issues. Its LinkedIn page states a company size of 51 to 200 employees.
The projects that never arrived
The pattern repeats wherever the sums get large.
In November 2024, reporting identified Traore, as chief executive of Zoom Network and Sarpoe Construction, as the man who invited Runda Solar to Liberia for a 250-megawatt solar project in Montserrado County. No power purchase agreement, cabinet approval, regulatory filing or concession instrument tying that project to him or his companies has surfaced. Malaikah Energy Group, in which he claims a vice presidency, was reported in 2024 to be seeking more than 60 percent of financing from European institutions for a Liberian power solution, with the government carrying the balance over time; a 2025 report on a proposed 950-megawatt project said the money would come primarily from an American financial group. Neither financier was ever named. In September 2025, Zoom Network published an account of Traore and Underground O&D representatives touring “the company’s mining operations” in Jackson Village, Bong County. No mining licence or concession linking any of his companies to mineral rights there has been located.
Large financing announcements without disclosed capital providers and megaprojects without regulatory instruments are the oldest telltale signs in development finance.
Madrid
Zoom Network’s LinkedIn page states that its chief executive initiated a strategic partnership with the Real Madrid Foundation in collaboration with the Ministry of Youth and Sports. In the interview Traore went further, saying he took the delegation there himself, and offering to send video of the meeting.
The engagement did happen. An account of the March 26, 2026 Madrid meeting names the participants as Youth and Sports Minister Cornelia Wonkerleh Kruah, Ambassador Teeko Tozay Yorlay Sr., Joseph Nyuma Boakai Jr. and Real Madrid Foundation managing director Julio Gonzalez Ronco. Traore is not among them. When the ministry announced the follow-up engagement of June 23, 2026, it named two visiting sports figures, Farid Adjaoud and Mohammed Diallo, and traced the visit to Minister Kruah’s working trip to Paris. Neither Traore nor Zoom Network appears.
Coming Next: In a follow-up, The Liberian Investigator will document Ibrahima Traore’s dealings with officials of the Boakai administration and test the credentials he presented.
Discussion about this post