Brazilian miner Vale loses $ 1.6 billion in 2019 due to the Brumadinho disaster

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The Brazilian company Vale lost $ 1.6 billion in 2019, according to the annual results released on Thursday, and the position as the world's largest iron ore producer in a year marked by the Brumadinho disaster, in which 270 people died. The red numbers, advanced by O'Globo, are due to the provisions and expenses derived from the rupture of a raft of toxic waste in January of that year that released a lava tsunami that led the dining room of a mine full of employees at lunch time. The game linked to the catastrophe amounted to 7.4 billion dollars.

The result of the last year contrasts with the bulky benefits of the previous one, when Vale earned more than 6,800 million dollars. Brumadinho's was the second similar disaster in a multinational mine in Brazil in four years. The former killed about twenty people in addition to causing immense environmental damage.

When the Prosecutor's Office presented its indictment in January against the then president and other Vale executives for intentional homicide, he linked his way of proceeding with the obsession for the first position in the sector: “With the support of (the auditor) Tuv Sud, Vale it operated a murky arrangement with the objective of maintaining a false security image of the company that sought to avoid, at any price, impact on its reputation and, consequently, achieve world leadership (of the sector) in market value, ”wrote the prosecutors in the complaint. The Australian Rio Tinto is the world's largest producer of iron ore after the Brazilian's production fell more than 20% to 300 million tons.

A judge must decide if he accepts the complaint and sits on the bench Fabio Schvartsman, who was removed as executive chairman after the catastrophe, and 15 other executives of the mining company and the German company Tuv Sud who only six months earlier certified that the raft It was stable.

In the annual financial balance, released after the closing of the Exchange, the current executive president, Eduardo Bartolomeo, refers to the Brumadinho tragedy: “A year has passed since the dam collapsed, and I would like to reaffirm our respect for Families of the victims. Vale stands firm in its purposes: completely repair Brumadinho and ensure the safety of our people and our assets. We have made significant progress, with an effective repair program, with significant improvements in our government and operations, and with an accelerated dismantling and implementation plan for our dams built up (the cheapest way of construction, that of the rafts of both disasters) ”.

Vale, with 55,000 employees in Brazil, is one of the largest multinationals in the country. Investigators accuse part of Vale's dome of knowing, at least two years before the raft gave way, that it had reached a critical level; Prosecutors argue that managers also had detailed information on the status of these deposits used to store mining waste. The company "systematically concealed this information from the public authorities, from society, including investors and shareholders of the company," according to the prosecutor's complaint.