After Sierra Leone's President Took Office, His Wife and Her Family Went Real Estate Shopping

On a grey September day in 2016, a Sierra Leone opposition politician and his wife threw a first birthday party for their daughter in the modest courtyard outside their subsidized rental flat in South London.

Within less than two years, the couple’s lives would change dramatically. In April 2018, Julius Maada Bio won his second bid for the Sierra Leonean presidency, and the family moved into the luxury of the State Lodge in the capital Freetown.

Now that she was first lady, Fatima Bio left behind a career in Nollywood, the West African film industry, and launched a global campaign against child marriage and sexual violence. She and three of her relatives also appear to have gone on a buying spree.

Sale records and other documents obtained by OCCRP show that between May 2022 and February 2024, Fatima Bio acquired two villas, an apartment building, and a flat in Gambia — a country 1,000 kilometers up the Atlantic coast where she previously lived. Her mother is also listed as the owner of a luxury villa that was purchased for half a million dollars in the same time frame, while Fatima Bio’s two half-brothers either snapped up properties or were able to begin construction on land that had lain undeveloped for almost two decades.

According to Gambian property and tax records, Fatima Bio and her relatives spent just over $2.1 million on at least 10 properties, almost all of which are located in affluent neighborhoods and tourist hotspots. On top of this came construction costs, including for a large hotel that is being developed by one of Fatima Bio’s half-brothers. 

The sales records also revealed that properties registered in the names of Fatima Bio and her mother were purchased with the help of an individual named Alphonso Lakhmee King. He signed as a witness on documents for three of the properties, and is listed as having paid the stamp duty tax on the villa belonging to Fatima Bio’s mother.

Reporters found that King has attended numerous events with the first family and was one of the country’s top five government contractors in 2019 — the most recent year that public procurement reports have been published. Sierra Leone’s National Public Procurement Authority confirmed that his company continues to do business with various government bodies, though it did not provide further details.

In a brief phone conversation with OCCRP, King denied assisting with or paying for any of the first lady’s Gambian property purchases. When asked about his company’s contracts with the Sierra Leone government, he said, “I don’t know about that,” and hung up. 

OCCRP reviewed Fatima Bio and her relatives’ tax records, employment history, asset ownership, and publicly available information about their lifestyles and could not find evidence of the kind of wealth needed to buy and develop their new real estate holdings, raising questions about the origin of the funds.

Fatima Bio and her husband — who as president is barred from holding other positions that generate private income — did not respond to detailed questions, including about the source of the money used for the new properties.

One of Fatima Bio’s half-brothers, Abdoul Mois Darboe, told OCCRP that his recent property acquisitions and projects, which include the development of a hotel and the purchase of two apartments in high-end coastal estates, had been “self-funded” from his company’s construction work. However, his tax records contained no sign of the revenue these construction projects may have generated. 

Fatima Bio’s mother and her other half-brother did not respond to requests for comment. 

Julius Maada Bio, who played a key role in Sierra Leone’s civil war in the 1990s, came to power amid frustration with the perceived mismanagement of the country under his predecessor Ernest Bai Koroma, who had been in power for 10 years. As president, Bio has declared the fight against corruption to be one of his top priorities.

However, watchdog organizations like Transparency International say that corruption has remained a major challenge under his administration, with weak checks on the executive office, low levels of transparency, and several documented cases in recent years of large-scale embezzlement or misappropriation of public funds.

In the ‘Beverly Hills’ of Gambia 

Upon entering Gambia’s Brufut Heights — an exclusive neighborhood on the Atlantic coast lined with the villas of diplomats and businessmen — one structure stands out above the rest.

Behind a high concrete wall, the glazed white villa supports a wrap-around terrace overlooking a pool and, beyond, the ocean.

Nearby, a second white villa, built in a modernist style, is almost hidden from public view by its exterior wall and the surrounding jungle. The building is layered into multiple terraces, with an L-shaped pool, additional guesthouse, and spacious garden.

The owners listed for the two properties on first sight bear no obvious relation to the first lady of Sierra Leone. The first villa is registered as having been bought by one Yusupha Darboe in October 2020, with a stamp duty payment indicating a purchase price of just over $230,000, after which it was renovated and enlarged. The second villa was acquired by Tidankay Darboe in May 2022, for half a million dollars, according to sales records.

Yet social media posts reveal these two people are connected to Fatima Bio, with numerous images and descriptions posted by relatives indicating that Yusupha Darboe is the first lady’s half-brother, and Tidankay is her mother, who now uses the surname — Darboe — of her second husband.

Images shared on social media also show that Fatima Bio and her relatives have made use of the second villa registered in her mother’s name.

Publicly available information on the wealth of Fatima Bio’s mother and half-brother Yusupha Darboe suggests they would have been stretched to afford the coastal villas registered in their names.

The Gambian tax register for Tidankay Darboe, Fatima Bio’s mother, does not record any tax payments by her beyond the stamp duty on the villa, which is listed as having been paid on her behalf by King, the Sierra Leone government contractor. In a 2002 interview, Fatima Bio described her mother as being in need of financial support, saying that she opened a shop “chiefly to finance my mum, who is around and needed a place to work.”

As for Fatima Bio’s half-brother Yusupha Darboe, photos posted on his Facebook profile show he spent several years working at a hotel in the U.S. state of Maryland before moving back to Gambia. His exact position at the hotel could not be confirmed. 

In 2016, he registered a business in Gambia called Uniglobe Properties, operating in real estate. He registered the business as a “sole proprietorship,” which means that any taxes on profits the firm paid would be reflected in his personal tax records. However, the records indicate that he has paid a total of only $2 in income tax in the years since setting up Uniglobe properties, indicating that neither he nor his company has generated taxable profits, or that he didn’t declare them.    

Property Buying Spree

The sales records and registry documents obtained by OCCRP show that in March 2023 and February 2024, Fatima Bio spent just under $360,000 on four Gambian real estate purchases of her own.

In March 2023, she acquired a two-bedroom apartment for $85,000 in Forest View, an upscale estate in the popular tourist district Senegambia Strip, plus a three-floor villa with a pool in the high-end district of Bijilo, for $81,000.

The following year, in February 2024, the first lady bought a four-story apartment building next to the Chinese embassy in Bijilo. The stamp duty payment indicates the price was around $148,000. As of April 2025, the complex offered apartments for rent for 110-130 euros a night. 

Fatima Bio purchased another villa in Bijilo, with cream and ochre walls, in February 2024 for $44,000 — less than the price that the empty plot of land it stands on had sold for in 2012, according to a handwritten property transactions record from the time. (Separate property records show that an application to lease the land to Fatima Bio was made as early as 2012, but the transfer of the land and the $44,000 payment were not processed and finalized until the start of 2024.)

Prior to becoming Sierra Leone’s presidential couple, Julius Maada Bio and his wife appear to have lived modestly, raising questions about the source of the funds used to pay for the new Gambian real estate.  

A retired military officer who helped stage a series of coups in the 1990s, Julius Maada Bio briefly served as head of state before leaving Sierra Leone for asylum in the U.S. Little is known about this phase of his life, though in September 2001 he and his first wife bought a small house just outside Washington, D.C., making a down payment of $27,099, and covering the remaining $242,850 with a mortgage. The house was sold a few years later.

In 2011, Julius Maada Bio returned to political life after securing the presidential nomination of the Sierra Leone People’s Party, the country's main opposition party. 

As recounted by Fatima Bio in interviews, the couple met in 2012 in England, where Julius Maada Bio was fundraising among the Sierra Leonean diaspora. The following year, they married at a modest private event in East London, according to Fatima Bio’s interviews and media coverage.

Fatima Bio had moved to London after making a name for herself as an organizer of beauty pageants in Gambia in the early 2000s. There, she worked as a model and actress in the city’s African diaspora cultural scene. She appears as the director and secretary of a company, Miss Afro-Caribbean UK Limited, that was registered at her home address in London in 2008, and dissolved less than two years later. According to U.K. electoral register records, she lived with her two children in a two-bedroom council flat — subsidized accommodation for those with low incomes.

Photos retrieved from social media show Fatima Bio and the children living in the council flat in South London’s Southwark, with Julius Maada Bio featuring in the photos after their marriage. During this period, the future president was enrolled as a PhD student in Peace Studies at Bradford University in northern England.

There are signs Fatima Bio is still renting the flat, which could be a violation of council rules that state tenants must use the property as their primary residence.

Southwark Council told OCCRP “the resident currently residing at the address has been the tenant of the property since December 2007 to the current date,” but declined to name that person for personal data protection reasons.

When OCCRP and the U.K.’s Times newspaper visited the council block in early March this year, letters addressed to the presidential couple were deposited on the staircase leading to their apartment. Fatima Bio’s daughter, Tigda Soley, was registered to vote there in 2023. 

In 2024, more than 300,000 households were on social housing waiting lists in London, the highest number in over a decade.

Luxury Beach Condos For 'Quick Cash'

Fatima Bio’s other half-brother Abdoul Mois Darboe has also been active in the property market in recent years. 

After returning to Gambia in 2011, following a decade of living and working as an engineer in the U.K., he set about building a hotel. But he only had limited savings from his time abroad, he told OCCRP, and ran out of money soon after work on the foundations began in 2014. By the following June, the work had stopped and the site was abandoned, according to satellite images. 

Yet by mid-2019, over a year into Julius Maada Bio’s presidency, construction on the hotel resumed, with work on one of its two four-story buildings now well advanced.   

The hotel, which Abdoul Mois Darboe says will offer 70 bedrooms, sits on the edge of a verdant wetland and near a popular business district, and is a huge structure compared with others in the area. 

In an interview with OCCRP, he said the construction was entirely self-funded and denied any connection between the project and his sister.

"I don’t think she even knows anything about this hotel, because I never discuss it with her,” he said. “She has no relation to me when it comes to business.”

He said he was paying for the hotel’s construction with revenue generated through projects that his company, Zen Construction, has undertaken with the World Bank and Gambia’s National Roads Authority and Ministry of Agriculture. He said that Zen Construction was his primary source of income and that he didn’t have projects in Sierra Leone.

Gambia’s roads authority confirmed that it had an ongoing project with Zen Construction without providing details. Abdoul Mois Darboe did not provide the names or any documentation of that or the other construction projects he cited, nor did he explain why their revenue streams are not visible in his tax records, which reference only two income tax payments in 2015 and 2016, totaling an equivalent of less than $300. In his interview with OCCRP, Abdoul Mois Darboe suggested he would lose money from his project with the roads authority. 

The World Bank and Ministry of Agriculture did not respond to questions in time for publication.  

A document from Gambia’s Department of Lands and Surveys shows that Abdoul Mois Darboe acquired the rights to the land the hotel stands on in 2023, the same year that his tax records show two stamp duty payments that correspond to real estate transactions worth around $295,000.

He told OCCRP that the document had formalized his ownership of the plot, and did not answer follow-up questions about whether those stamp duties were paid as part of his acquisition of the land, or for the purchase of other properties.

In 2024, Abdoul Mois Darboe bought two more properties: a penthouse in a luxury coastal estate, Fajara Waterfront, for half a million dollars, and a two-bedroom apartment for $150,000 in Kololi Sands, another high-end apartment complex on the beach. 

He told OCCRP he would not have had enough funds to finish the entire hotel so he opted for apartments, which offered “quick cash” that could then be used to finance the hotel construction.  

A Friend of the Family 

At least three of sales records have a common denominator: signatures from “Alphonso L. King.“

The purchase of the Brufut Heights villa acquired by Tidankay Darboe was signed by King as a witness, and he also paid the $9,000 stamp duty, according to tax documents obtained by OCCRP. King also signed as a witness for two of Fatima Bio’s purchases.

When reached by phone, King told OCCRP that he was not aware of any new properties bought by the first lady in Gambia, and that he had not paid for or assisted with any such real estate transactions. Neither Fatima Bio nor her mother responded to questions about the source of the funds for the purchases.

There is little publicly-available information about King. Company records show that he holds Sierra Leone nationality, and Swiss public records show he previously lived for many years in Switzerland. While neither he nor Fatima Bio and her relatives answered questions about the nature of their relationship, photos show him by the family’s side on various occasions.

His company, Alphonso King Investment (SL) Ltd., was the fifth biggest government supplier in 2019, according to Sierra Leone’s Annual Public Procurement Assessment, which is only publicly available for 2018 and 2019.

The company, which has no online presence, received three contracts worth a total of around $4.8 million at the time, according to the procurement report, which does not say what these contracts were for. In the same year, the company received a government contract to supply vehicles for a World Bank-funded project.

Public procurement data shows that in 2022, the firm was given another contract by the education ministry to supply sanitary pads for schoolgirls — a project initiated by Fatima Bio.

Sierra Leone’s National Public Procurement Authority told OCCRP that the company remains active and has “continued to engage in business transactions with various government Ministries, Departments, and Agencies.” It did not provide further details in time for publication.