Hong Kong (CNN Business) Rio Tinto's former CEO got a huge payout last year despite being forced to resign over the company's destruction of a sacred Indigenous site in Australia. Jacques was forced to depart under pressure from investors last September in the wake of the mining giant's demolition of the Juukan Gorge caves in Western Australia. The company destroyed the 46,000-year-old Indigenous site last May to expand an iron ore mine. The local custodians of the land, the Puutu Kunti Kurrama and Pinikura people, had been fighting for seven years to protect the caves. Rio Tinto later apologized for the incident, with its chairman Simon Thompson admitting: "What happened at Juukan was wrong."

Source: CNN February 22, 2021 10:30 UTC