MONROVIA, Montserrado – The Supreme Court of Liberia has granted a medical leave to Varney Sherman, one of the co-defendants in the ongoing Sable Mining bribery case.
Sherman recently collapsed to the floor due to illness while attending a function at the Capitol. He was briefly rushed to the John F. Kennedy Memorial Hospital where his conditions were temporarily stabilized.
His lawyers, Cyril Jones of Jones and Jones Law Firm, and G. Moses Paegar of Sherman and Sherman, had filed a motion asking the court to allow their client to seek medical intervention abroad.
The court granted the defense’s request, admonishing the accused to return to the country after his medical interventions.
“Your client, Cllr. H. Varney G. Sherman, is therefore hereby permitted to travel out of the bailiwick of Liberia for the medical intervention sought, and to return to the country after the medical intervention aforesaid,†a communication from Judge Yusif Kaba read.
Sherman and several other defendants were indicted on May 24 last year on charges including economic sabotage, bribery, criminal conspiracy, and criminal solicitation.
They were accused by Global Witness, a U.K.-based corruption watchdog, that focuses mostly on investigating exploitations of natural resources, of collaborating to rewrite the Public Procurement and Concession Act to give Sable Mining, a British company, a non-competitive acquisition of mineral rights over the Wologizi Mountain in Lofa.
