News

Information concerning Samarco’s criminal prosecution and fines, as well as the ongoing repairing operations, due to the collapse of the Fundão dam, have generated a series of doubt and indignations throughout the firm’s communication channels. Because of this, Samarco gives us some explanations concerning these various points:

Repairing operations

Directly after the collapse of the Dam, activities were paralysed and concentrated in emergency actions such as relocating families and repairing the damages, in addition to this, monitoring systems and security measures for the remaining dams were reinforced. In august 2016, repairing actions were conducted by Renova Foundation, a foundation created by Transaction and Conduct Adjustment Term (TTAC), approved by Samarco, Vale and BHP, as well as the federal governments of Minas Gerais and Espírito santo. This foundation is an independent and non-lucrative institution, whose mission is to implement and supervise all the repairing and compensating programs throughout all the affected regions.

Criminal prosecutions and fines

In relation to the criminal prosecutions involving Samarco and individuals, the Justice has proclaimed a temporary suspension on all activities in order to reassess some of these interrogations. It is important to point out that this decision does not mean a total acquittal for the firm as there is still yet to be a real judgment and trial. Furthermore this also does not interrupt any cleanup and repairing operations defined by TTAC and executed by Fundacao Renova. All the programs are still running normally, thanks to the financial resources that assure the completion of actions as can be seen here in this explanatory note.

Concerning Samarco´s fines, they legally respond to the environment entities and legal bodies. In certain cases, the company appealed as stated in the law because some technical and juridical aspects needed to be reassessed. It is important to keep in mind that the cleanup and reparation programs processed by Fundaçao Renova have already received from Samarco 2 billion reais. It is expected that up until 2018, 4,4 billion reais will be reassigned to Fundaçao, which is an amount higher than the expected fines.

We remain committed to this purpose and we stay available throughout our social media to anyone needing any type of other or further explanations.