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Forest Service to move forward with plans to issue a final environmental impact report and hear a last round of public comment before issuing a decision on transferring the land to Resolution Copper, a joint venture by the multinational mining companies Rio Tinto and BHP Group.

The first stage of it will determine if BHP – as a parent company – was liable.

The dam was owned by Samarco, a joint venture between Vale and BHP.

Separately to these legal proceedings in Brazil, more than 620,000 people had taken BHP to court in the UK, where BHP was headquartered at the time, in a trial that started earlier this week.

The claimants’ lawyers argued successfully that the trial should be held in London because BHP headquarters “were in the UK at the time of the dam collapse”.