Israeli billionaire Beny Steinmetz recovered from a setback in a long-running legal battle over an iron-ore project in Guinea, when one of his employees defied the advice of lawyers and gave hours of testimony to a Paris arbitration court denying allegations of bribery. Asher Avidan was the top official in Guinea for Steinmetz’s BSG Resources, which is accused of paying millions of dollars in bribes in 2008 to win the right to mine part of the West African country’s giant Simandou iron-ore deposit. Steinmetz’s company sought compensation at the World Bank arbitration tribunal in Paris after Guinea’s government stripped BSGR of its rights to the deposit in 2014.
