Brazilian miner Vale agreed Thursday to pay $7 billion in compensation to the state of Minas Gerais where the collapse of its dam two years ago killed 270 people, polluted rivers and obliterated the surrounding landscape, the Wall Street Journal reported. The settlement, the biggest in Brazilian legal history, is a watershed moment for a country long hampered by impunity and where miners and big businesses have often exerted more power than the state, especially in rural areas.

Brazilian appliance retailer Casa & Video filed for an initial public offering on Friday, according to a preliminary prospectus on the securities industry watchdog CVM website, Reuters reported. The Rio de Janeiro-based company has hired the investment banking units of Itau Unibanco Holding SA, Banco Santander Brasil SA, Citigroup, BTG Pactual SA and XP Investments to manage the offering, confirming a previous Reuters report. The company did not disclose in the filing a pricing range for its shares nor the pricing date.

Brazilian right-wing President Jair Bolsonaro on Wednesday wrote to newly inaugurated U.S. President Joe Biden that he hoped the two countries would pursue a broad free trade agreement during Biden’s tenure, Reuters reported. The letter is Bolsonaro’s most amicable overture yet to Biden, a Democrat. The Brazilian president was a close ally of former Republican President Donald Trump and refused for weeks to accept the result of the Nov. 3 U.S. election, repeating baseless allegations of fraud. It took him 42 days to recognize Biden’s victory.

The Brazilian state of Minas Gerais is hoping to win at least 28 billion reais ($5.3 billion) from a compensation deal with miner Vale SA after the 2019 Brumadinho deadly dam burst, a senior state official said on Wednesday, Reuters reported. State and Vale officials will meet on Thursday, when it is expected talks on compensation will begin, ahead of a court-mediated hearing expected in January, said state secretary general Mateus Simões. “The idea is that we end the text discussion tomorrow and start the value discussion,” he told Reuters.

Latin America’s luck will change. Pandemic lockdowns caused more regional corporations to default between early May and June. But yield-starved investors will ignore some of these risks, Reuters reported. There’s a lot of bad news to ignore. The International Monetary Fund expects Latin American and Caribbean economies to contract by more than 8% in 2020, the most of any region, with only a 3.6% improvement in 2021. And non-financial companies with foreign debt have seen revenue dented by a combined $200 billion due to the pandemic, Fitch Ratings estimates.

Brazilian engineering group Odebrecht, whose name became synonymous with graft due to its role in the nation’s sweeping Car Wash corruption investigation, is changing its name as it tries to turn the page on that scandal-plagued history, Reuters reported.

TIM Participacoes, Telefonica Brasil SA and America Movil SAB de CV’s Claro won an auction on Monday to acquire the mobile operations of Brazil’s Oi SA with a joint bid of 16.5 billion reais ($3.23 billion), the companies said in a series of securities filings, Reuters reported. The winning trio, which had submitted an initial bid in July, plans to split Oi’s assets once they have antitrust approval. Oi, which filed for bankruptcy protection in 2016, is selling assets to repay creditors. The group was the auction’s sole bidder, according to the filings.

Brazil’s government will pardon about half of the roughly 14 billion reais ($2.6 billion) in debt owed to it by Brazilian telecom firm Oi SA, the country’s solicitor general said on Friday, Reuters reported. Oi, which has been working to emerge from bankruptcy protection for years, had accumulated gargantuan fines tied to quality of services and other regulatory demands, making telecoms regulator Anatel one of the company’s biggest creditors. The settlement, with the remainder of Oi’s government debt payable in installments, puts an end to 1,700 ongoing court cases between Oi and