A French court decided to adjourn the corruption trial of the son of Equatorial Guinea’s president until June 19. Proceedings in the case against Teodorin Obiang have come to a halt two days after they had begun.
Beny Steinmetz, owner of mining group BSG Resources, has been released without charge by Israeli police after being held under house arrest in connection with bribery allegations.
The corruption trial of Teodorin Obiang, the eldest son of Equatorial Guinea’s President Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo, opens Monday in Paris. Obiang is accused of amassing millions of dollars through “bribes and kickbacks”.
The former minister of mines and geology for the African Republic of Guinea was arrested on Tuesday in New York and charged with taking $8.5m in bribes in exchange for assigning lucrative investment rights to a Chinese-owned conglomerate.
Rio Tinto’s Guinean payment scandal has deepened, with bitter rival Beny Steinmetz threatening to sue for billions of dollars in damages after alleging the leaked emails at the centre of the scandal show Rio had a hand in stripping his company of valuable iron ore tenements in the African nation.
The consultant who was paid $US10.5 million by Rio Tinto for helping recover iron ore concessions in Guinea had “privileged” access to the African nation’s president and had “acted hand in hand with Guinean authorities” it has been claimed on French television.
A former minister of mines of Guinea, Mahmoud Thiam has told Bloomberg that the head of Rio Tinto’s Guinea operation, Steven Din, offered him a bribe six years ago.
Och-Ziff Capital Management Group, the New York-based hedge fund that is buying 14 ski resort properties across the country, including Loon Mountain and Mt. Sunapee, earlier this year agreed to pay $412 million in criminal and civil penalties to settle charges related to offering bribes in several African nations, with some money allegedly going to…
Rio Tinto, long the bluest of blue-chip companies, finds itself mired in a corruption scandal over how it was able to secure a fabulously large iron ore project in the jungles of the Simandou Mountains, in the historically corruption-challenged west African nation of Guinea.
If you want to do business in the west African nation of Guinea it seems there is a good chance you will bump into Francois de Combret.