MinRes to put lithium mine in ice, to cut 300 jobs
The company will put its Bald Hill lithium mine in Western Australia under care and maintenance starting this week.
The United States’ top securities regulator has rejected arguments by Rio Tinto (LON:RIO) and two former top executives that its civil lawsuit claiming they tried to cover up multi-billion losses on a coal investment in Africa should be dismissed.
Last week, the company, its former chief executive Tom Albanese, and its ex finance director Guy Elliott moved to have the case dismissed, arguing that they did not attempted to conceal the plunging value of the company’s coal assets in Mozambique while Rio Tinto raised billions of dollars in the US bond market.
The SEC said its complaint adequately alleged that fraud occurred, and that Rio Tinto, former CEO Tom Albanese and ex-CFO Guy Elliott did intend to deceive investors.
In a court filing quoted by Reuters, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) said its complaint adequately alleged that fraud occurred, and that Rio Tinto, and the former executives intended to deceive investors.
“This is not simply a case about Rio Tinto’s valuation of Rio Tinto Coal Mozambique,” the SEC said in one of the filings.
The charges originally laid by the SEC in October last year relate to allegations of an attempt to cover up multi-billion losses on a coal investment in Mozambique.
Those assets were acquired for $3.7 billion in 2011 from ASX-listed Riversdale Mining, but sold a few years later for $50 million. Rio ultimately took a $3-billion write down on Riversdale — later renamed RTCM — in January 2013, when it also fired Albanese.
The SEC also rejected Rio’s argument that the alleged misstatements and omissions might be immaterial because the impairment charge “was only 3%” of the company’s assets. It said Rio’s earnings would have been reduced by more than 50% at the half-year in 2012 if it had properly impaired the assets. “No readers could sensibly conclude that the halving of Rio Tinto’s earnings was ‘obviously unimportant to a reasonable investor’,” the SEC said.
The case is being heard by US District Judge Analisa Torres.
Comments
nilperora
As I remember it, the valuation of these assets was always based on two things 1) that environmental restrictions would be changed or waived, and 2) that there were significant metallurgical coal supplies. Regional geologists were highly skeptical about metallurgical coal, and it was only Rio Tinto that was implicitly claiming a waiver on environmental risk. Were these counter-factual claims by RTZ well founded or just wishful thinking? Unless internal communications can show they were reasonably misled, on the face of it, the SEC has a very strong case.