Rio Tinto Ltd chairman Simon Thompson yesterday said that he was accountable for the mining giant destroying sacred Aboriginal sites in Australia to access iron ore and he would not seek re-election as a board director next year.
Thompson’s announcement came after former Rio Tinto chief executive officer Jean-Sebastien Jacques in September last year announced his resignation over the destruction of two rock shelters in Juukan George in Western Australia state that had been inhabited for 46,000 years.
The company’s successes last year were “overshadowed by the destruction of the Juukan Gorge shelters ... and, as chairman, I am ultimately accountable for the failings that led to this tragic event,” Thompson said in a statement.
Photo:AP
“The tragic events at Juukan Gorge are a source of personal sadness and deep regret, as well as being a clear breach of our values as a company,” he added.
Jamie Lowe, chief executive of the National Native Title Council which represents Australia’s traditional owners of the land, described Thompson’s departure as a necessary step that the country’s Aborigines had been demanding since the rock shelters were blasted in May last year.
“We think the cultural shift within Rio Tinto needed to happen immediately, and it’s too bad it’s taken some eight months to be actually able to see that come to fruition,” Lowe said.
Jacques was replaced in January by Jakob Stausholm.
Former Rio Tinto iron ore division chief executive Chris Salisbury and former group executive of corporate relations Simone Niven also left the company last year in connection to the destruction that outraged the traditional owners of the gorge, the Puutu Kunti Kurrama and Pinikura people.
Rio Tinto yesterday also announced that Michael L’Estrange, a non-executive director at the firm, would retire from the board after the annual general meetings in the UK and Australia next month.
L’Estrange led a widely criticized internal review of how the rock shelters came to be blasted against traditional owners’ wishes.
The review in August last year concluded that there was “no single root cause or error that directly resulted in the destruction of the rock shelters.”
However, internal documents in September revealed that Rio Tinto had engaged a law firm in case the traditional owners applied for a court injunction to save the rock shelters.
The Western Australia Government has promised to update Aboriginal heritage laws that allowed Rio Tinto to legally destroy the sacred sites.
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