"UK court to reconsider $6.9 bln Brazil dam lawsuit against BHP", 6 May 2021

London's Court of Appeal will hear a request to revive a 5 billion pound ($6.95 billion) lawsuit against Anglo-Australian mining group BHP over a 2015 dam failure in Brazil, a court order showed.

Judge Nicholas Underhill has agreed to an oral hearing that could help to overturn a previous Court of Appeal decision which denied a 200,000-strong Brazilian claimant group permission to appeal against a judgment to strike out the landmark case...

The order comes less than two months after the Court of Appeal refused permission for a lawsuit over Brazil's worst environmental disaster to proceed in English courts. read more

The Court of Appeal said in March it agreed with a lower court that the case was an abuse of process, that claimants could - and were - making reparation claims in Brazil and that the lawsuit would be "irredeemably unmanageable".

The collapse of the Fundao dam, owned by the Samarco venture between BHP and Brazilian iron ore mining giant Vale, killed 19 and sent a flood of mining waste into communities, the Doce river and the Atlantic Ocean, 650 km (400 miles) away...