The European Commission has stopped payments to Sierra Leone with immediate effect because the country is not cooperating in the extradition of the Dutch fugitive Jos Leijdekkers, known as Bolle Jos.
Dutch justice minister David van Weel confirmed the halt to the daily De Telegraaf.
Sierra Leone was due to receive €18 million in budget support from Brussels this year.
The Netherlands hopes a further €20.5 million in 2027 can also be blocked; talks among member states on that sum are still open.
Dutch reports put the wider grant envelope for 2021-2027 at €352 million. The European Union’s multiannual indicative programme for the country earmarked €245 million for 2021-2024, with the rest subject to a mid-term review.
Dutch reports say the stop applies to payments, and that the multi-year programme has not been formally cancelled.
Van Weel said he was “very pleased” with the step.
“It is bitter that EU money goes to a country that does not want to cooperate in the extradition of someone like Bolle Jos.”
He added that the Commission was thereby signalling doubts about cooperation with Freetown.
The Hague has treated his arrest and return as a priority for more than a year.
A formal extradition request has produced no result. In June 2026, Van Weel asked Brussels to cut development aid; other capitals had not then agreed.
The payment freeze is the first concrete use of that lever.
Leijdekkers, from Breda in the southern Netherlands, has been on Dutch and Europol wanted lists since 2022.
He was sentenced in his absence to 24 years in the Netherlands for cocaine trafficking and ordering a murder, by a court in Rotterdam on June 25, 2024.
Belgian courts have added further terms, including eight years handed down in Dendermonde on May 19, 2026, over an 11-tonne shipment from Sierra Leone to the Belgian port of Antwerp. The cargo was hidden in palm kernel meal and put at a street value of €550 million. Twenty other defendants were convicted in the same case, and Leijdekkers was fined €80,000 and barred from the port for 10 years.
Combined sentences are put at more than 80 years in Dutch and Belgian reporting.
The Dutch public prosecution service has offered a €200,000 reward, its highest, for information leading to his arrest.
He is believed to live in Sierra Leone under the name Umar Sheriff, the identity police in Freetown gave him when they announced a manhunt in February 2025, and is alleged to be still running his crime empire from Africa.
Footage from a church service in January 2025 showed him beside Agnes Bio, daughter of President Julius Maada Bio; Dutch and international reporting says he is engaged to her and that they have a child.
The Economist has described a cocaine transit network and alleged protection from above, including a diplomatic passport and travel with presidential security. It reported that Sierra Leone had been turned into a transit point for Colombian cocaine over about five years, with consignments concealed in legitimate cargo such as rice.
The same reporting said police and navy units prepared a seizure at sea off West Africa that was called off at the last moment. His older brother Harry was extradited from Turkey on June 3, 2026 and faces money-laundering charges in the Netherlands.
On September 11, chief minister David Moinina Sengeh called the Dutch pressure “scandalous” and “neo-colonialism”, said Sierra Leone did not live on European money, and stated that the security services did not know where Leijdekkers was. “If they know, show the pictures,” he said.
A European Parliament resolution of September 17 called for closer judicial cooperation with West African states so that convicted traffickers do not evade sentence, and backed a new EU sanctions regime, with asset freezes and travel bans, aimed at trafficking networks. It was adopted by 601 votes to four, with five abstentions, and did not name Leijdekkers.
Sierra Leone’s First Lady, Fatima Jabbe-Bio, has retained tenancy of a subsidised council flat in Southwark, south London, despite living in a presidential mansion in Freetown, the Sierra Leonean capital, and being linked to a substantial property portfolio in West Africa.…
— Brussels Signal (@brusselssignal) May 18, 2026
