Rio Tinto, a major resources company, asked a US district court to dismiss a complaint brought against the company by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) regarding the behaviour of two former executives and the miner after the $3.7bn purchase of a Mozambican coal prospect. In October 2017, the SEC outlined a devastating critique of how former Rio Tinto CE Tom Albanese and chief financial director Guy Elliott misled the group’s board and its shareholders in a disastrous $3.7bn purchase of a Mozambican coal project that had little value and was eventually sold for $50m. Rio and its former executives challenged the SEC’s complaint in a letter to a judge in a New York District Court last week, arguing it should be dismissed, seeking legal fault with the complaint and why it was deemed to be deficient. Gibson Dunn, the law firm representing Rio, said it had written to the SEC pointing out what it believed were the "specific pleading deficiencies in the complaint". "The SEC respo...
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