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Summary
Tuesday’s preliminary hearing in the cocaine trafficking case against former Vice President Jewel Howard-Taylor has been pushed to Wednesday, September 2, at 10:00 a.m., after the Ministry of Justice requested a last-minute continuance. The delay comes as questions grow around the state’s timeline linking her to an alleged cocaine network.
Court Grants Continuance Hours Before First Hearing Was Set to Open
By Rodney D. Sieh, [email protected]
MONROVIA — The preliminary hearing in the cocaine trafficking case against former Vice President Jewel Howard-Taylor will not go forward until next as Wednesday, September 2, 2026.
Early this morning, The Ministry of Justice’s Office of the City Solicitor asked the Monrovia City Court for a continuance just hours before the case was due to open, and Stipendiary Magistrate Cllr. L. Ben Barco granted it.
The hearing will now resume Wednesday, September 2, at 10:00 a.m.
In its request, the government said the Supreme Court’s closing of its March Term of Court had pulled several senior lawyers away to attend on their supervisors, leaving the prosecution short of the counsel it needed for the day.
It is a short delay, but it lands at a moment when the state’s own account of the case is drawing closer scrutiny. Howard-Taylor faces nine charges built around allegations that a businessman, Sheikh Bassirou Kante, introduced her to an alleged Croatian-Ukrainian cocaine network in “early 2022,” first at her Congo Town residence and later in Dubai.
What has quietly complicated that narrative is a matter of public U.S. court record: Kante was arrested in Maryland on April 20, 2022, on wire fraud and money laundering charges unrelated to narcotics.
The charge sheet gives no specific date for the Congo Town meeting or the Dubai trip, and no travel records placing Kante in Liberia or the Gulf ahead of his arrest have yet been made public. That gap has left room for a question the defense is expected to press hard on Wednesday: where, precisely, was everyone when this was supposed to have happened?
Howard-Taylor has denied all charges.
Her legal team has called the case baseless and politically motivated and says it will contest it vigorously when the hearing resumes.
FrontPageAfrica will continue to follow this story as it develops.
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