5 Dollars Year of the Rat

Liberia's late-1990s commemorative program was essentially a commercial licensing operation — the Central Bank contracted with foreign private mints to produce themed collector coins with no meaningful domestic circulation. This piece was struck almost certainly in China or by a European private mint on Liberian authority, a common arrangement that let the issuer collect seigniorage from overseas collectors while Liberia itself remained in the middle of a brutal civil war under Charles Taylor's NPFL-dominated government.