Published: August 14, 2026
MONROVIA – Payments and contract changes for Liberia’s US$116 million Roberts International Airport highway are frozen until the contractor appears before the legislature, after East International Group failed to appear at an audit hearing for the third day and lawmakers ordered the Ministry of Public Works to break off all dealings with the company.
The joint legislative Public Accounts, Expenditure and Audit Committee directed the ministry on Wednesday to halt every payment, every payment discussion and every proposed amendment to the contract, and to refer the company to the committee if it makes contact.
“Any payment, any issues concerning payment, amendment to the contract, should stop until it comes to the committee and answers to the auditor,” the Representative Clarence Gahr said. “So stop where you are.”
The committee rejected the company’s request for 90 days to respond, giving it roughly 30 days instead. Rep. Gahr said the contractor’s absence from a public accounts hearing indicated that Liberians cannot easily get answers from a company executing a government contract, and that approving any amendment while the audit questions remain open would put public money at further risk. The Ministry of Finance also failed to appear.
The deputy minister for technical services, appearing as acting minister for Public Works Minister [Roland Giddings], said the ministry discovered after taking office that the contract carried no bill of quantities, and that it had to demand one from the contractor to establish how the contract price had been arrived at. When the breakdown came, it showed about US$93 million assigned to civil works, with the balance covering design, supervision, ministry oversight and contingency.
He said the road stood at 27 percent physical implementation when the current administration took office in January 2024 and is now at 65.8 percent. He said a further extension of the contract is imminent, beyond the April 2027 deadline set by an earlier amendment, because the Junk River bridge and the remaining kilometers cannot be finished in time.
Sen. Amara Konneh, co-chairman of the committee and chairman of the Senate Public Accounts Committee, told the hearing that the Auditor General had issued an adverse opinion on the audit, the most serious finding available to an auditor. He said the report identified completion certificates issued to the contractor with no supporting evidence, and variances the ministry would have to explain.
The compliance audit, covering April 2021 to April 2025, found that US$1.15 million was disbursed to East International without the completion certificates the contract required, and a payment variance of US$577,808 between the figures reported by the Ministry of Finance, the Ministry of Public Works and the contractor.
Senator Gbezhongr Findley, co-chairman of the committee, who told the hearing he is an engineer, said the audit had not gone far enough. He said the cracking already visible in the pavement raised questions about the bitumen and the sub-base material that the financial audit was not equipped to answer, and that the committee needed the contract specifications, the material procurement records and the supervision reports before it could judge whether the government had received what it paid for. He said the project appeared to him to be well below standard, though he could not say so conclusively without the documents.
The acting minister attributed the visible defects to the road having been left at binder course level for years while financing stalled. He said the design provides for a wearing surface over the binder, that the binder was never intended to carry traffic loads for that long, and that the road is designed to last 20 years if completed to specification. He said the ministry revised the design after finding deficiencies in the hydraulics and geology, brought in a hydraulic engineer through its Korean partner, raised the axle loading from 8.2 tons to 11.2 tons, and set the road capacity at 80 tons and the bridges at between 80 and 100 tons. He said the bitumen specified is 40/50 penetration grade rather than the medium 60/70 normally permitted.
He also said the ministry added a pedestrian overpass near a hospital section after three people were killed there within three months.
The former public works minister, Ruth Cooker Collins, who signed the original agreement, told the committee the project began as a pre-financing arrangement in 2016 for asphalt pavement on 24.5 kilometers of secondary road from Clay to DC Clarke in Bomi County and on neighborhood streets in Monrovia. She said the legislature amended the act in January 2020 at the request of then-President George Weah, substituting the remaining neighborhood segments with the airport corridor, and that the pre-financing contract for the 45-kilometer highway was signed in October 2020. She said a later amendment extended completion from April 2024 to April 2027.
She said the ministry hired a supervising consultant and referred technical questions to her former deputies. However, Senator Findley noted that the consultant is not named in the audit report and said the firm shares responsibility for what was certified and paid.
The committee gave the ministry a list of documents to produce before the next sitting: the contract, the consultant’s contract and its periodic supervision reports, the reports underlying each payment, any certificates of completion issued, and the ministry’s own technical review. It also directed that the Environmental Protection Agency be written to submit its reports on the corridor or, if none exist, to conduct an environmental assessment from ELWA Junction to the airport.
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