Billionaire Beny Steinmetz faces judges again
Sentenced in January 2021 to five years in prison for corruption of public officials, the Franco-Israeli appealed. The trial began on Monday.
Beny Steinmetz was found guilty of having paid, between 2006 and 2012, 8.5 million dollars in bribes to the fourth wife of Guinean President Lansana Conté. (File photo)
KEYSTONE/Martial Trezzini
Beny Steinmetz’s appeal trial opens Monday in Geneva. The 66-year-old Franco-Israeli mining king was sentenced in January 2021 to five years in prison for bribing foreign public officials in Guinea and forgery in securities. The billionaire and his two acolytes appealed.
After the Geneva Criminal Court, the Criminal Appeal and Review Chamber will have eight days to consider a case concerning the obtaining of rights in the Simandou region, in Guinea, where one of the largest untapped deposits is located. iron of the planet. The investigation lasted seven years, and the file has more than four million items.
Resident in Geneva at the time of the events, Beny Steinmetz was found guilty of having paid, between 2006 and 2012, 8.5 million dollars (approximately 8.2 million francs) in bribes to the fourth wife of the Guinean President Lansana Conté. According to justice, the objective of his mining group – Beny Steinmetz Group Resources (BSGR) – was to obtain the rights then held by the Anglo-Australian giant Rio Tinto.
“Wonderful profit”
Even if the payments to Mamadie Touré did not take place until after the death of Lansana Conté in 2008, the judges considered that the president, ill, ceded part of the rights on the basis of a promise. BSGR spent 160 million dollars (about 154 million francs) for two concessions, then it sold 51% of its shares to the Brazilian Vale for 2.5 billion, of which 500 million were paid to it.
For the court, Beny Steinmetz withdrew a “tremendous profit” from this sale, hence his condemnation to a compensatory claim of 50 million francs in favor of the State of Geneva. Regarding the accusation of forgery in the titles, the judges concluded that the billionaire had indeed simulated the sale of an offshore company fictitiously holding land in Romania, in order to transit part of the funds intended for Mamadie Touré.
“Corrupt Pact”
The judges of first instance thus followed the thesis of a “corrupt pact” put forward by the Public Ministry. A 59-year-old Frenchman played a key role in enabling BSGR to gain power in Guinea thanks to Mamadie Touré. For the Criminal Court, this intermediary found the means to send the funds to the widow of the president, taking care to hide their source.
The man in the field and his two associates received 34.5 million dollars in remuneration thanks to the takeover of their shell company by a company of BSGR. He was sentenced in Geneva to 3.5 years in prison and a compensatory debt of 5 million francs.
The third protagonist of this pact, the administrative director in Geneva of Beny Steinmetz’s companies, was sentenced to a two-year suspended prison sentence and a compensatory debt of 50,000 francs. The judges considered that this 52-year-old Belgian took part in the complex assembly of structures intended to cover the tracks of payments and hide names. The three defendants will appear free.
From scratch
The defense will again plead acquittal. She prepared the media ground with the distribution, by a communication agency, of a document aimed at “restoring the facts”. BSGR’s problems are said to have originated in its refusal to give in to the “state blackmail” of Alpha Condé, Guinea’s president from 2010 to 2021, who demanded millions from him to be able to stay in the country.
Suspicions of corruption would have been built from scratch with the support of George Soros, “a personal enemy of Beny Steinmetz”, and NGOs funded by the American billionaire. In 2014, Guinea stripped BSGR of its mining rights, considering them to have been obtained illegally. These rights are now held by a Sino-Singaporean-Guinean consortium.
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