Liberian ex-leader still trying to run things says UN

UNITED NATIONS - A top United Nations envoy warned on Friday that Liberia's ousted president, Charles Taylor, was still trying to run the country from exile and that Nigeria may want to reconsider its agreement to serve as his new home.

Jacques Klein, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan's special representative for Liberia, said Taylor was believed to have taken an estimated US$1 billion ($1.73 billion) in government money with him, leaving the West African nation with an empty treasury as it tries to start rebuilding after 14 years of civil war.

He was believed to be still taking kickbacks on Liberian purchases of fuel and other goods, through intermediaries, and there was "good evidence that over the past three weeks at least one or two government officials and several business leaders had gone to Nigeria to see him," Klein told reporters.

"We had a president who was his own treasury," said Klein, a former US diplomat and Air Force major general who has called Taylor a "psychopath".

"Whatever resources Liberia had -- the ships registry, the rubber plantation, the import and export of fuel -- all that money went to him," he said.

When he left for Nigeria, "there was an agreement Taylor would maintain a low profile and be apolitical, and we hope that he will honour that commitment that he made," Klein said.

"If he is violating that, obviously at some point the government of Nigeria will have to reassess how it views his continued presence."

A former warlord indicted for war crimes by a UN-backed tribunal in neighbouring Sierra Leone, Taylor agreed under international pressure to leave Liberia for Nigeria on August 11, raising hopes of an end to 14 years of nearly constant internal strife he himself began in 1989.

Taylor, now living in Calabar in southeastern Nigeria, told Liberians as he left, "God willing, I will be back."

A new government is due to take over in Liberia on October 14, but the country is still largely in the hands of faction fighters, many of them once loyal to Taylor.

Nigeria has no extradition treaty with the Sierra Leone court but has said it does not want him meddling in Liberian politics from there.

- REUTERS