The English High Court on Friday ruled that Australia-based company BHP Mining was liable for the collapse of the Fund ã o Dam in Brazil over a decade ago, which caused the country’s worst environmental disaster, despite the company not owning the dam then.

In delivering the long-awaited decision, Justice Finola O’Farrell held that the collapse, which killed 19 individuals, was reasonably foreseeable and rejected the arguments from BHP’s defense team that the dam failure was a “sudden and unexpected” incident. The court had considered the evidence illustrating how, over a year before the catastrophic event in 2015, the dam had started exhibiting signs of distress, such as seepage and cracking, and that a proper stability analysis at the time would have revealed an unacceptably high

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