LatinNews Daily - 17 November 2025

*The Australia-headquartered mining company BHP has been found liable by a London court for the 2015 collapse of a dam in the Brazilian municipality of Mariana, Minas Gerais state. The dam was jointly owned by BHP and the Brazilian firm Vale. Its collapse, which killed 19 people, is regarded as Brazil’s worst-ever environmental disaster, contaminating hundreds of kilometres of waterways with toxic sludge. The court concluded that “the risk of collapse of the dam was foreseeable” due to “obvious signs of contractive, saturated tailings and numerous incidents of seepage and cracking”. It added that failure to take corrective action was “the direct and immediate cause of the collapse”. The British law firm Pogust Goodhead, which is representing over 600,000 Brazilian plaintiffs, said at the commencement of the case in October 2024 that it was seeking compensation of up to US$47bn. Separately, BHP and Vale agreed that same month to pay the Brazilian government R$100bn (US$18.9bn) over the next 20 years in compensation for the disaster, and to pay a further R$32bn to those affected, in addition to the R$38bn which they said they had already paid.

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