Hong Kong (CNN Business)Rio Tinto (RIO) has found a new chief after a crisis this year led to the ouster of its top executive.
On Thursday, the mining giant named Chief Financial Officer Jakob Stausholm as CEO. Stausholm will assume the role on January 1, the same day outgoing CEO Jean-Sébastien Jacques is slated to step down.
Jacques resigned under pressure from investors in September over the company’s destruction of a 46,000-year-old sacred Indigenous site in Australia. It demolished the Juukan Gorge caves in Western Australia in May to expand an iron ore mine.
The decision to blow up the site had faced a seven-year battle by the local custodians of the land, the Puutu Kunti Kurrama and Pinikura people, to protect it.
Rio Tinto later apologized for the incident, with its chairman Simon Thompson admitting: “What happened at Juukan was wrong.”
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