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Lawyers for Israeli mining tycoon Beny Steinmetz have mounted a fresh attempt to have his bribery conviction overturned, with a cache of hacked documents they say proves alleged illegal behaviour by the Swiss prosecutor who put him in jail.
Steinmetz, a multi-billionaire investor who made his fortune in diamonds, became one of the most influential and controversial figures in the global mining business before his takeover of the world’s largest iron ore deposit led to a spectacular fall from grace.
In January 2021, a Geneva court found him guilty of having bribed Guinean officials to secure the mining rights to the Simandou’s iron ore, sentencing him to five years in jail. An appeal attempt last year failed to overturn the conviction but saw his sentence commuted to three years.
Steinmetz’s lawyers are already contesting that appeal with the Swiss Supreme Court, but last week filed a new motion to have his conviction in Geneva declared invalid, demanding a retrial.
Seen by the Financial Times, the motion contains a series of documents lawyers claim were hacked from the Israeli Ministry of Justice.
A trove of Israeli Ministry of Justice files were dumped online by an unknown hacking group in April in an apparent attempt to discredit Israel’s treatment of Palestinians. The Israeli MoJ’s files also contained documents on Steinmetz, an Israeli citizen.
Steinmetz’s lawyers claim the documents show the Geneva prosecutor responsible for his case, Claudio Mascotto, travelled to Israel and allegedly entered into secret negotiations with the key witness who testified against Steinmetz, his former business partner Ofer Kerzner.
Mascotto promised Kerzner that he would not be prosecuted, as long as he testified against his former associate, Steinmetz’s lawyers allege.
Under Swiss law, any form of plea bargaining is illegal.
Steinmetz’s lawyers are seeking the annulment of all legal findings against him since 2017. They request a retrial and ask that the testimony of Kerzner, and another key witness is struck from the record.
“We are talking about a man who has been unjustly found guilty on the basis of unreliable evidence. And if we’ve come this far, it’s because the prosecution has breached fundamental norms of procedure in order to gather evidence it wanted to rely on in support of an indictment,” Steinmetz’s lawyer, Daniel Kinzer said.
A spokesperson for the Geneva prosecutor declined to comment, citing their official obligation to remain silent about current legal proceedings.
Steinmetz has long argued — without evidence — that Mascotto held a personal grudge against him and overstepped his remit as a prosecutor on the case. After his appeal failed last year, he also accused the billionaire George Soros of having funded a campaign against him and unduly influenced Swiss courts.
The Guinean government stripped Steinmetz’s company BSG Resources of its rights to Simandou — one of the richest prizes in mining — in 2014, after having concluded he had bribed public officials.
Steinmetz’s putative partner in the project, the Brazilian mining group Vale, subsequently launched its own legal action against him, accusing him of having fraudulently lured the company into the deal.
Vale dropped a $1.2bn personal claim against Steinmetz in London in 2022, however, on the basis that too much time had elapsed since the contested events for a legal claim to be valid under UK law.
