Rio Tinto Told to Pay Withheld Incentives to Former CEO
March 11 2020 - 10:21PM
Dow Jones News
By Stuart Condie
SYDNEY--Rio Tinto Ltd. will pay former Chief Executive Sam Walsh
millions of dollars in bonuses that the mining giant had withheld
pending a regulatory investigation into payments related to the
Simandou iron ore project in Guinea.
Mr. Walsh retired as CEO in 2016 and agreed to a staged deferral
of long- and short-term incentive payments while authorities,
including the U.K.'s Serious Fraud Office, looked into a consultant
payment from Mr. Walsh's time as head of Rio Tinto's iron-ore
operations.
With the investigation ongoing, Rio Tinto wanted to extend the
deferment past the agreed December 2018 deadline, but an
independent confidential and binding dispute resolution process has
determined that Mr. Walsh should be paid.
Rio Tinto will pay 6.8 million Australian dollars (US$4.4
million) plus interest, Mr. Walsh said Thursday in a statement.
"I am pleased that the position with my incentive payments has
been resolved in my favor and that there is no basis for those
awards to be further deferred by Rio Tinto following the dispute
resolution process," Mr. Walsh said in the emailed statement.
Neither Rio Tinto nor a representative for Mr. Walsh would
comment on whether the agreement contained clawback arrangements
related to any eventual findings of the investigation. Neither
party had any information about a potential date for the
investigation's conclusion.
"When the deferral agreement was entered into, both Rio Tinto
and [Mr. Walsh] hoped that the Simandou regulatory investigations
would have been completed by now," Rio Tinto Chairman Simon
Thompson said.
Write to Stuart Condie at stuart.condie@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
March 11, 2020 23:06 ET (03:06 GMT)
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