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privileges. Upon expiration of this 2-year period the company was
again granted an extension, for another two years. When it
requested a third extension in 1978, the Government decided to
withhold a final decision pending the receipt of financial
statements by the Ministry of Finance's Concession Secretariat
whose officials had complained to the Minister that since the
first extension of the duty free privileges, in 1973, no reports
on the company's operations had been received (54).
The company's performance had been very modest indeed. When the
management had asked for an extra two years of import duty
exemption, in September 1973, it had announced the expansion of
its oil palm mill, doubling its capacity from five to ten tons per
hour, the installation of a modern terminal in the port of
Buchanan to export the company's produce, and a massive land
clearing program comprising eventually 1,000 acres to be developed
as grazing land for cattle ranching and a beef industry. The
conflict with LAMCO J.V., however, delayed the execution of the
planned activities in the port of Buchanan, whilst the acreage
under plantings increased by just 100 acres, from 5,500 acres in
1972 to 5,600 acres by December 1978. In the same year work was in
progress on 1,000 acres, but LIBINCs managers informed the
Government that the plantation had not yet started to produce (55).
Government files are conspicuous by their shortcomings or their
absence. In October 1973 it was In an Internal memorandum of the
Ministry of Finance reported that "Ue have no record anywhere
indicating the time of the. Legislative ratification" (56) of the
concession agreement with LIBINC, and consequently it was
impossible to calculate the expiration dates of the tax privileges
granted as nobody within the Ministry knew the effective date of
the agreement. Upon request the company later provided the
Government with the necessary information.
As the company still enjoys income tax exemption, and because its
achievements have been modest, the financial contribution of
LIBINC to the Treasury has been very small, almost solely
consisting of the payment of a land rental which varied between
I 1,500 and $ 2,500 yearly in the 1966 - 1978 period. This was
less than the rent the company paid for its Monrovia office.
Despite the promising future of Liberia's oil palm products, virtually
nothing had been achieved nearly two decades after the
Liberian Government's attempt to introduce another cash crop than
rubber. This certainly was not due to the investment incentives
which were liberal and generous enough - as is demonstrated by the
fact that J. Paul Getty, the owner of LIBINC, in 1972 started another
important investment in Liberia. In that year he entered the
promising Liberian logging business with the acquisition of an old
(timber) concession, through the wholly owned company Vanply of
Liberia, Inc. (see Chapter 9)
THU WEST AF~RICAN AGRICULTURAL CORPORATION
The West African Investment and Finance Corporation, a company