Milad Hage, the Lebanese businessman who built one of Red-Light Market’s largest property portfolios before his death, left a will naming Oumou and eight other beneficiaries — his children — and spelling out provisions for her medical care.
MONROVIA — Oumou Hage has learned to expect delay. Not a denial, exactly — nobody has told her outright that she can’t have the money her late husband set aside for her medical care. Just delay, one continuance at a time, while her health waits on a court date.
By Rodney D. Sieh, rodney.sieh@frontpageafricaonline.com
Milad Hage, the Lebanese businessman who built one of Red-Light Market’s largest property portfolios before his death, left a will naming Oumou and eight other beneficiaries — his children — and spelling out provisions for her medical care. That should have settled things. It hasn’t. Each time Oumou asks the court to release funds so she can travel abroad for treatment, the request has to clear an objection window for Nohad Hage Mensah, one of the nine beneficiaries, whose lawyers get to argue against it before a judge will act. The other beneficiaries, Oumou says, have never objected. It doesn’t seem to matter. The clock still runs.
“They claim Nohad Mensah, who is only one of the beneficiaries, has to be the one to accept or deny whether the widow should be granted access to her own entitlement,” is how Oumou’s camp describes it — and however the legal mechanics actually work, the practical effect is what she experiences: weeks of waiting for an argument date, while her lawyers wait for Nohad’s lawyers to show up and contest a medical request nobody else in the family disputes.
Court Paid $US150K to Daughter
Compare that, Oumou says, to how quickly the same court has moved for Nohad. FrontPageAfrica has obtained a copy of a letter that shows just how quickly: dated March 8, 2018, and signed by Clerk of Court Edwin S. Boimah, Sr., it instructs Mr. John B. S. Davies, then president and CEO of the Liberia Bank for Development and Investment, to prepare a manager’s cheque for $150,000 — payable to “Mrs. Nohad Hage Mensah, biological Daughter of the late Milad R. Hage” — drawn from a specific escrow account tied to the estate. The letter cites a ruling issued six days earlier, on March 2, 2018, by Judge J. Boima Kontoe, the judge then assigned to the Hage testate estate, ordering the payment. Six days, start to finish, from ruling to a bank being told to cut the cheque. The letter was copied to Oumou herself, along with Judge Kontoe and attorney Stanley Kparkillen.
FrontPageAfrica has obtained a copy of a letter that shows just how quickly: dated March 8, 2018, and signed by Clerk of Court Edwin S. Boimah, Sr., it instructs Mr. John B. S. Davies, then president and CEO of the Liberia Bank for Development and Investment, to prepare a manager’s cheque for $150,000 — payable to “Mrs. Nohad Hage Mensah, biological Daughter of the late Milad R. Hage” — drawn from a specific escrow account tied to the estate.
That 2018 letter documents one specific $150,000 payment to Nohad, not a running policy, and FrontPageAfrica could not immediately reach Nohad Hage Mensah or her attorneys for comment on Oumou’s broader account of how her own, more recent medical-fund requests have been handled. But the document does something Oumou’s account alone couldn’t: it shows, on paper, that this court has moved a six-figure sum to one beneficiary in under a week when it wanted to. That’s the baseline Oumou is measuring her own experience against — and it’s why she calls the gap a double standard rather than just bad luck with scheduling.
A Fight That Outlived the Man Who Started It
To understand why a widow’s medical request can get tangled in litigation at all, it helps to know what the Hage estate actually is: one of the longest-running, highest-stakes inheritance disputes in Liberia’s modern legal history. Milad R. Hage’s holdings — more than 200 commercial properties across Red Light, Kakata and elsewhere — have been fought over since his death, through multiple rounds at the Supreme Court, competing claims to executorship, and, most recently, a 2025 jury verdict at Monrovia’s Civil Law Court finding Nohad Hage Mensah liable for falsifying deeds tied to the estate and for collecting rent from tenants on properties Oumou says were never hers to collect from. That verdict is now the subject of a new-trial motion, with Nohad’s lawyers arguing it ran contrary to the weight of the evidence — a motion still before the court.
So the fight over Oumou’s medical funds isn’t happening in isolation. It’s playing out inside a family and a legal file that have been at war over the same 200-odd properties for the better part of a decade, where every request either side makes gets read, fairly or not, as a move in a much longer game.
Money That Isn’t Supposed to Be in Dispute
What makes Oumou’s case sting, by her account, is that this isn’t supposed to be a contested question. The will provided for her medical care. No other beneficiary has objected to releasing it. And yet, she says, funds tied to the same estate have gone toward renovating stores on the property while her own requests sit waiting for a hearing date. She’s watched the labor court judge overseeing the matter push back decision after decision, with no ruling and no clear timeline for one.
It’s the kind of grievance that’s easy to dismiss as one family’s internal dispute — until you notice how closely it tracks a pattern women in Liberia’s courts describe again and again: that getting what’s legally already yours can depend less on the paperwork than on who’s arguing against you, and how much patience the system expects you to have while you wait.
Oumou says she’s done waiting quietly. She’s calling on Liberians to pay attention to a case that, whatever else it is, has now stretched across a decade, a Supreme Court docket, a fraud verdict, and — by her account — one widow’s unanswered request to see a doctor.
