A fraught election just reshaped the next steps for deep sea mining
Brazilian oceanographer Leticia Carvalho has been elected the next secretary-general of the ISA, a leadership change that could slow the rush to strip-mine deep sea ecosystems.
A Brazilian court has accepted a request for bankruptcy protection from miner Samarco, a joint venture between Australia’s BHP Group and Brazil’s Vale, according to a Samarco statement on Monday.
The firm’s financial trouble is connected to the collapse of a dam containing mining waste at a Samarco mine in 2015, killing 19 people and releasing a giant torrent of sludge.
It is considered Brazil’s worst-ever environmental disaster.
Vale said the bankruptcy protection filing would not impact Samarco’s ability to pay reparations to those affected by the 2015 dam burst. It said out-of-court negotiations with creditors had slowly broken down over time.
The in-court reorganization request, filed in the state of Minas Gerais, is roughly analogous to a Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing in the United States.
(By Marta Nogueira; Editing by Stephen Eisenhammer)
