At 66, the businessman, who made his fortune in the diamond industry and lives in Israel, obtained a “safe conduct” to go to his new trial, a document assuring him of being able to leave Switzerland freely at the end of the week and a half of hearings. The verdict will be known later.
In January 2021, the Geneva Criminal Court sentenced him to five years in prison and to pay 50 million Swiss francs (52 million euros) for “corruption of public officials” in Guinea.
“We are waiting for the Court to recognize that Beny Steinmetz has not corrupted anyone,” his lawyer Daniel Kinzer told AFP in an email.
A closer examination of the case reveals “a totally different picture from that painted by the first verdict”, he said.
The first trial was the culmination of a long international investigation opened in 2013 relating to mining permits granted in Guinea to the Beny Steinmetz Group Resources (BSGR), in which Mr. Steinmetz had the title of adviser.
The Geneva public prosecutor’s office accuses him of having set up a financial arrangement via shell companies in order to pay around 10 million dollars in bribes to the fourth wife of the former Guinean president Lansana Conté (who died in 2008 ), Mamadie Touré, so that BSGR obtains mining rights in Guinea.
Ms. Touré claimed to have received payments and has since been protected by American justice. She did not appear at the trial in 2021, to which she had been summoned as a witness by the defense.
Beny Steinmetz, who lived in Geneva when the facts of which he is accused took place, assured that he had “never” asked anyone to pay funds to Ms. Touré, and accused her of telling “lies”.
“The mining rights were taken from a competitor for hoarding them, then awarded to BSGR based on a strong and compelling business case, without the need to bribe a public official,” Kinzer said. .
Two of Mr. Steinmetz’s business partners, a Frenchman and a Belgian sentenced in the same case to shorter prison terms, have also appealed.
– “Totally false” –
In preparation for the new trial, Mr. Steinmetz has shuffled his legal team, which intends to show that the trial court did not fully hear the defense’s arguments and misunderstood the facts.
His team considers it “totally wrong” to speak of corruption. In a document, it ensures that BSGR obtained the mining rights in Guinea completely legally and that the Rio Tinto group lost its mining rights in Simandou because it was not exploiting the site.
The Geneva prosecutor’s office, on the other hand, evoked a “corruption pact” between Mr. Steinmetz, his representatives in Guinea, former President Conté and Mamadie Touré.
BSGR obtained in 2008, shortly before the death of former Guinean President Lansana Conté, the right to explore blocks 1 and 2 of one of the largest iron deposits in the world at Simandou, where it invested 170 million of dollars. The company sold 51% of its shares to the Brazilian group Vale, for 2.5 billion dollars, in 2010.
According to the Geneva public prosecutor’s office, Beny Steinmetz would have promised as early as 2005, then paid or had paid, from 2006 to 2012, bribes, some of which would have passed through Swiss accounts, to Mamadie Touré, so that BSGR supplants the Anglo group. -Australian Rio Tinto in blocks 1 and 2 of the mine.
Following his election in 2010, President Alpha Condé overhauled all the mining permits granted by his predecessor, notably canceling BSGR’s rights in 2014.
In early 2019, BSGR and the new Guinean presidency reached an agreement agreeing that the company relinquish rights to Simandou in exchange for a drop in corruption charges. This arrangement did not put an end to the proceedings of the Geneva prosecutor’s office.
