A Guinea-born former Wall Street banker was sentenced to seven years in prison for laundering $8.5 million in bribes that he took while a government minister in the West African country. Mahmoud Thiam was convicted in May of taking illegal payments to help China International Fund Ltd. win exclusive rights to mine Guinea’s iron, gold, diamonds and bauxite deposits and then laundering the money into the U.S. Thiam served as Guinea’s mining minister from 2009 to 2010 after spending 14 years as an international investment banker at Merrill Lynch & Co. and UBS Group AG in New York.
— source bloomberg.com 2017-08-31