Scandal-hit mining companies BHP and Glencore pay record $12bn to investors

Scandal-hit mining companies BHP and Glencore have paid out a record $12bn in dividends to investors as the price of the materials the companies mine continues to boom.

BHP, the world’s biggest mining group which scrapped its dual stock market structure dropping London last year for a sole listing in Sydney, announced a record $7.6bn half-year dividend on Tuesday.

The company makes most of its profits from mining iron ore in the Pilbara region of Western Australia, where it has ministerial permission to destroy as many as 40 sites of cultural importance to the country’s native Aborigines.

Following investor outrage at its mining plans, the company subsequently pledged not to damage any of the sites without “extensive consultation” with native owners.

BHP is aiming to transition its business to derive half of revenues from “future facing commodities” – metals needed in a low-carbon economy beyond fossil fuels – by 2030. BHP made $9.7bn in adjusted profits for the half year to the end of December, a 57% year-on-year increase.

Anglo-Swiss rival Glencore, one of the world’s biggest miners and commodity traders, has also benefited from the soaring price of oil, gas and metals as economies seek to recover from the pandemic.

The company paid a $4bn dividend to shareholders as it reported record adjusted profits of $21.3bn last year, an 83% increase over 2020. Glencore also said it had set aside $1.5bn to pay for the costs of investigations into bribery and market manipulation.

The company is facing corruption investigations in the US, UK and Brazil relating to its mining operations in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, home to the world’s largest reserves of cobalt, a crucial metal in electric battery manufacture, as well as Venezuela and Nigeria.

“We recognise there has been misconduct in this company historically. We’ve worked hard to correct that,” said Gary Nagle, chief executive at Glencore. “Looking forward, we remain focused on our strategy … while operating in a responsible manner across all aspects of our business.”

Glencore, which said it expects to resolve the US, UK and Brazilian investigations this year, still faces potential corruption and bribery investigations by other countries, including Switzerland and the Netherlands.

Instead of selling or spinning off its coal operations as a number of its peers are – a strategy activist investor Bluebell Capital Partners has also urged the company to do – Glencore is instead pursuing a strategy of running them down with the aim of closure by the mid-2040s.

“Touting the work the company is doing in reducing its exposure to fossil fuels is one thing but while its peers are distancing themselves from coal, Glencore seems happy to hang onto it and deplete its use ‘responsibly’,” said Dan Lane, senior analyst at Freetrade. “The best PR machine out there wouldn’t be able to convince the market that the coal division is a sustainable or responsible one.”