Rio Tinto faces fresh controversy over $10.5m mining payment – by Tom Burgis and Neil Hume (Financial Times – November 15, 2016)

https://www.ft.com/

London – Rio Tinto’s lawyers uncovered more than a year ago internal emails about a questionable $10.5m payment to a consultant, but the mining company did not alert law enforcement authorities and investors about the matter until last week.

The Anglo-Australian group said on November 9 that it had notified authorities after discovering emails from 2011 that referred to the payment to the consultant, who helped head off a threat to Rio’s claim to the giant Simandou iron ore project in Guinea.

In the emails, seen by the Financial Times, Alan Davies, the executive in charge of Simandou, discusses with Tom Albanese, then chief executive, and Sam Walsh, then head of iron ore, paying a $10.5m fee to François Polge de Combret, a former top French banker and classmate of Guinea’s president.

Following an internal inquiry begun in August, Rio said last week that it had referred the matter to law enforcement authorities in the UK, the US and Australia. The company now faces years of scrutiny and the risk of large fines if it is found to have broken anti-corruption laws. Rio had suspended Mr Davies, the only one of the three executives in the email chain still at the company.

On Wednesday night, Rio announced it had terminated the contract of Mr Davies and that of the head of legal and regulatory affairs Debra Valentine.

The company said: “The board’s decision does not pre-judge the course of any external inquiries into this matter. However, the board concluded that the executives failed to maintain the standards expected of them under our global code of conduct … In the circumstances, the board terminated the contracts of both executives.”

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