Above cushioned sofas in the waiting room of Guinea's environment ministry, a clock features a face familiar from posters and buildings everywhere in Conakry: Guinea's military ruler-turned-President Mamady Doumbouya. The hands are stuck at a quarter to midnight. But for a nation that has spent three decades caught between promise and paralysis over the world's most coveted source of steel, a long-delayed new dawn may finally be approaching. After its discovery in the late 1990s, Simandou, Guinea's key mining asset, languished in a series of protracted legal and geopolitical sagas.
Rio Tinto, initially granted exploration rights over the entire Simandou range, was abruptly stripped of the northern half in 2008 when a dying President Lansana Cont awarded the asset instead to Israeli businessman Beny Steinmetz's BSGR. In March 2025 Steinmetz lost his final appeal in the Swiss courts against his 2021 conviction for bribery over the Simandou contract. In 2023, a five-year prison sentence was reduced to three years with 18 months to be served. He has announced his intention to challenge the ruling at the European Court of Human Rights.
In 2014, after a lengthy inquiry, President Alpha Cond annulled BSGR's rights on grounds of corruption, triggering further years of litigation. BSGR agreed in a 2019 settlement to relinquish its claims on Simandou. Now, after the decades of false starts, Simandou is at last rolling into action. Its timing is politically charged: the project is being switched on just weeks before the 28 December election and is chief among President Doumbouya's first administration deliverables.
