RIO DE JANEIRO: Brazilian mining company Vale posted a net profit of $4.8 billion last year, though its bottom line continued to take a hit from the fallout of a 2019 dam collapse that killed 270 people.

Vale’s net profit for the fourth quarter, published late Thursday, came in at $739 million — down from $2.9 billion the quarter before, but up from a loss of $1.56 billion in the fourth quarter of 2019. The 2019 collapse of a Vale mining waste dam in the town of Brumadinho in southeastern Brazil unleashed a deadly flood of toxic sludge and caused the company a net loss of $1.68 billion that year.

Vale is still paying the price: earlier this month, it announced it had agreed to pay $7 billion in damages to compensate victims and clean up the environment.

The company said its expenses related to the disaster were $4.85 billion for the fourth quarter of 2020.

But Vale, one of the world’s biggest iron-ore miners, said it got a boost from the recovery of international prices, fueled largely by demand from China. “In the second half of 2020, prices strongly increased following global economy recoveries from (the) Covid-19 pandemic,” it said in a statement.

Vale also faces another front of controversy on the French Pacific island of New Caledonia, where pro-independence activists have launched violent protests to prevent the company from selling a nickel plant it operates to a French-backed consortium.