Rio Tinto executives treated disgruntled shareholders on Wednesday with conciliatory attention as they indicated that compromises were not out of the question on the terms of the miner’s fund-raising deal with Chinalco .

Rio had redoubled efforts to listen to shareholders, said Paul Skinner and Tom Albanese, chairman and chief executive respectively, during three hours of questioning that included shareholders accusing Rio of “selling off part of the company silver”, being “totally unreasonable to agree to forget investors’ pre-emption rights” and dragging the group into a “strategic mire”.