Rio Tinto settles with Oyu Tolgoi whistleblower

Anglo-Australian Rio Tinto has managed to settle its dispute with former employee Richard Bowley, who claimed that the company was aware of problems at Oyu Tolgoi projects months before revealing that the project was running late and over budget, according to the Australian Financial Review.

Bowley, a British national, was a general manager between 2017 and 2019 on the expansion of Oyu Tolgoi, and he launched an unfair dismissal claim against Rio after his tenure was cut short in 2019.

It was reported that a tribunal hearing into the unfair dismissal case was scheduled to begin on Monday in London, but was aborted when the parties reached an agreement to settle their dispute. However, this settlement concerns Bowley’s early termination of his fixed term employment and not the issue of whether Rio failed its disclosure obligations with regard to Oyu Tolgoi.

“Rio Tinto and Richard Bowley have reached an agreement to settle the dispute arising from the early termination without cause of Bowley’s fixed-term employment in 2019,” said Rio in a statement.

Documents filed with a UK Employment Tribunal earlier this year show that Bowley had first alerted Rio executives to issues at Oyu Tolgoi in February 2018. Later in July 2018, the former employee had written to Rio's vicepresident of human resources copper and diamonds to warn that the multibillion-dollar project in Mongolia was 12 months behind schedule and 300 million USD over budget. However, Rio copper boss Arnaud Soirat conducted an investor briefing in early October 2018, in which it was claimed the Oyu Tolgoi expansion was “on budget and schedule”.

The delays to first production from the project was first revealed in October 2018 by Rio and Turquoise Hill Resources. The expansion of Oyu Tolgoi was originally agreed to cost 5.3 billion USD in 2015.

The exact size of the cost blowout is not completed, but Turquoise Hill signaled earlier this month that 6.8 billion USD was now the “base case” expectation, within a range between 6.6 billion USD and 7.1 billion USD. Sustainable first production from the expansion is now expected between October 2022 and June 2023, with February 2023 being the “base case”.