BHP Group (UK) Ltd and its parent company BHP are sued in a class action at the High Court in England, brought by more than 600,000 claimants seeking damages for the Fundão dam failure in 2015.
Multinational mining company BHP reached an agreement on Friday with its Brazilian counterpart Vale to equally split the cost of any damages related to proceedings in the United Kingdom over the 2015 dam collapse that killed 19 people in Brazil, while which denies liability for related claims.
BHP Group (UK) Ltd and its parent company BHP are sued in a class action at the High Court in England, brought by more than 600,000 claimants seeking damages for the Fundão dam failure in 2015.
BHP and Vale will each pay 50% of any potential amounts to be covered by claimants in the UK proceedings, the Netherlands proceedings and others in Brazil covered by the settlement, the company said on Friday.
Strengthens the framework agreement signed in 2016 for BHP Brazil and Vale to each contribute 50% to the financing of the Renova Foundation, which was created to ensure full and fair repair of the damage caused by the dam collapse .
"BHP believes that the English proceedings are unnecessary because they duplicate matters already covered by the Renova Foundation's existing and ongoing work and legal proceedings in Brazil," the company said.
BHP will continue to defend the UK proceedings and does not consider itself liable to related claimants, it added.
More than 720,000 Brazilians are suing the two companies over the collapse of the dam, which was owned and operated by their Samarco joint venture.
In March, a new lawsuit was filed against Vale and Samarco's Dutch subsidiary in the Netherlands in which BHP is not a defendant, BHP said.
Since proceedings in the UK were not initiated against Vale, BHP had filed a contribution claim against Vale in December 2022, which has now been withdrawn due to the new agreement.
"The effect of the agreement is that if BHP is ultimately found to have any liability to the claimants in the UK claims, or if Vale is ultimately found to have any liability to the claimants in the Netherlands, such liability would be shared equally between BHP and Vale," Vale said in a separate statement.
The November 2015 collapse of a tailings dam at a Samarco iron ore mine near Mariana, in Minas Gerais state, created a vast flow of sludge and mining waste that buried a nearby town, killing 19 people. , leaving hundreds homeless and polluting the Doce River.
