Published: August 19, 2026
MONROVIA – Former Vice President Jewel Howard-Taylor has been charged with cocaine trafficking, criminal conspiracy and money laundering, the most senior figure yet accused in the narcotics investigation that has already reached into the police, the National Security Agency and the prison service.
She was stopped from leaving the country at Roberts International Airport on Wednesday morning and taken to Liberia National Police headquarters. The charges were announced hours later at the Ministry of Information by the Attorney General and Minister of Justice, who said they followed investigative procedures and a review of evidence presented by the Joint National Security Investigative Team.
Howard-Taylor faces seven counts. Under the Controlled Drug and Substance Act of 2023 she is charged with unlicensed importation of a controlled drug or substance under Section 14.83, unlicensed sale, trading, administration, dispensation, delivery, distribution, dispatch in transit and transportation under Section 14.85, and illicit trafficking under Section 14.93. Under Chapter 10 of the Penal Law she is charged with criminal solicitation, criminal facilitation and criminal conspiracy. She is also charged with money laundering under Section 15.2 of the Anti-Money Laundering and Terrorist Financing Law.
Inspector General of Police Gregory Coleman has linked the former vice president to the Duazon seizure, the 3,971 kilograms of cocaine recovered from a warehouse in Margibi County in July and valued by the police at about US$317.68 million, the largest narcotics haul in Liberian history.
Three foreign nationals described by the ministry as members and organizers of the same network have been charged in absentia. They are Nikolai Ivancic and Mihovil Vrovac, both Croatian nationals, and Tara Zaderieko, a Ukrainian national. The ministry said it would pursue all lawful domestic and international measures to locate the three, apprehend them and bring them before Liberian courts.
Separately, the former deputy director of the National Security Agency for administration, Gerald Smith, has been called in for questioning in the same investigation.
The minister framed the charges as a threshold moment for the state. No office is too high, he said, no political connection too powerful, no nationality immune and no individual beyond the reach of the law. He said the government’s objective was not merely to seize narcotics or arrest low-level operatives but to dismantle the network’s leadership, financing, logistics, protection arrangements and international connections, and that the evidence would be followed across institutions, political boundaries and national borders. There would be no selective justice, political protection or sacred cows, he said, and every person against whom credible and admissible evidence is established would be prosecuted without fear, favor or political consideration.
The ministry emphasized that charges are accusations rather than judgments of guilt, that all defendants are presumed innocent unless and until proven guilty before a court of competent jurisdiction, and that they are entitled to legal representation and to the constitutional and statutory protections guaranteed under Liberian law. Citing an active investigation spanning multiple individuals and jurisdictions, the ministry said it would withhold information that could compromise operations, endanger cooperating persons or prejudice judicial proceedings, and it urged the public, political actors and media institutions to avoid speculation, the intimidation of witnesses and the publication of unverified information.
The charges bring to the country’s second-highest former office an investigation that began with 237.6 kilograms of cocaine intercepted at Roberts International Airport on June 7 in cargo booked for London, a shipment valued at about US$19.2 million. That case has since produced charges against a Monrovia entertainment executive and a logistics manager, the detention and questioning of four senior police and intelligence officers, the arrest of a Monrovia Central Prison operations officer and the removal of a deputy commissioner of police. The Duazon warehouse raid in July widened it by an order of magnitude.
Howard-Taylor served as vice president from 2018 to 2024 in the administration of George Weah and represented Bong County in the Senate before that. She is the former wife of former President Charles Taylor.
The Ministry of Justice said further information would be released when legally and operationally appropriate.
