By Jean-Pierre BorisPosted on 13-08-2019Modified on 13-08-2019 at 15:02

French-Israeli businessman and diamond-maker Beny Steinmetz will be tried in Geneva for corruption and forgery. Swiss justice accuses him of using false documents and corrupt practices to obtain a mining concession in Guinea-Conakry between 2005 and 2010. But who is Benny Steinmetz?

If Benny Steinmetz did not venture in the early 2000s to conquer iron ore deposits in Guinea Conakry, perhaps he would never have hit the headlines. He would have remained the rich man, quiet and discreet that his website describes.

A philanthropist-turned-diamondist, art lover, funding the Tel Aviv Museum, head of an Elie Wiesel Foundation, still fond of posting photos where he is seen with two other Nobel Peace Prize winners, Nelson Mandela and Shimon Peres . Two men that his fortune allowed Steinmetz to approach. With a little more than a billion dollars to his credit, Steinmetz is one of the fifteen richest Israelis according to Forbes magazine and he is one of the five hundred big French fortunes ranked by the magazine Challenges.

A diamond dealer who learns quickly

Born in 1957, Benny Steinmetz moved to Antwerp at the age of 20. He wants to learn the business of diamond dealer, a diamond dealer that his father already practices in Israel after fleeing Poland, from 1936. Very talented, the young man quickly take a new dimension to the family business, especially through its close association with the South African giant De Beers .

And he knows how to take advantage of the setbacks of this famous partner to expand his activities, going beyond the simple trade to exploit deposits or embark on jewelry. With several thousand employees, he is at the head of a small diamond empire. He has his yacht, his private plane, his luxurious residences.

Two weeks of house arrest

But instead of staying there, he is seized by the taste of something else. This other thing is the Guinean iron ore, a poorly exploited eldorado that in the 2000s, booming commodities, interests the giants of the sector as the British Rio Tinto . A fierce competition commits itself. That which is worth to him to be accused today of having corrupted one of the wives of the ex-president Lansana Conté and to have used false documents, all to take away the concession of two of the four batches of the mega - Simandou's land he will quickly sell to the Brazilian Vale .

►Also read: Guinea: Franco-Israeli billionaire Beny Steinmetz to be tried in Geneva

If he managed to settle this dispute with Guinea's Alpha Conde thanks, it is said, through Nicolas Sarkozy, Benny Steinmetz is at the center of a large number of police and judicial procedures. In 2016, he will be briefly arrested by the Israeli police and placed under house arrest for two weeks. But the FBI is also interested in him and as we have just illustrated today, Swiss justice also.

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