Rio Tinto chief executive Jean-Sebastien Jacques has said he “fully respects” the views of Indigenous academic Prof Marcia Langton after she slammed the mining company for handing over the management of native title agreements to “spin doctors”.

Jacques, who was speaking in London as Rio announced a half-year profit of $3.45bn, refused to address specific criticisms made by Langton but repeated his earlier apologies for the company’s decision to blow up 46,000-year-old caves at Juukan Gorge in Western Australia earlier this year.

He said the company would make a submission to a parliamentary inquiry into the debacle on Friday, and he would also be giving evidence to the committee.

The company’s board is conducting a separate review which Jacques said would be made public.

Langton – who has previously had a good working relationship with Rio Tinto – slammed the company on Tuesday over the way it deals with traditional owners in an opinion piece for Guardian Australia.

“The destruction of the Juukan Gorge caves demonstrates that in the implementation of Indigenous land use agreements, Rio Tinto has little regard for the formal provisions of agreement and little regard for the spirit of the agreement that establishes a ‘partnership’ with the traditional owners,” Langton said.

She said that after Rio ran into financial strife in the 2010s “community relations personnel in Australia were made redundant and the complex native title agreements were handed over to spin doctors to manage”.

Asked about this allegation, Jacques said: “I fully respect her views.”

“We are taking the relationship with the traditional owners very seriously, there is no doubt from this perspective,” he said.

“It is fair to say that if I reflect on the past 10 years, the reporting line of the heritage team has been changing a few times.

“At some stage, it was under finance, at some stage it was under HR, and so on and so forth.”

He said the company now had a position on the executive committee of the iron ore division dedicated to heritage issues “to make sure we have the right position around the table”.

He said he met with Langton to discuss her concerns.

“I’m not going to comment on the comment made by Marcia, but once again the only thing I can say here is that one topic that the board-led review will look into is to make sure that we fully understand the root cause of what happened,” he said.

Jacques said the company wanted to make sure it did not make the same mistake again.

The company is also dealing with an Australian tax bill of more than $530m over a marketing hub it set up in Singapore and a long-running investigation into a multimillion-dollar payment to a consultant in relation to a stake in a vast iron ore deposit in Guinea’s Simandou mountains.

Rio said Australian and Singaporean tax authorities had agreed to negotiate with each other about how much tax should be paid in each country.

“If the tax authorities are unable to reach agreement within two years, any disagreement between them will be resolved via binding arbitration,” the company told the stock exchange.

“We will accept the outcome of this bilateral dispute resolution process.”

Rio controls two of the four blocks at Simandou in a joint venture with its largest shareholder, Chinalco.

The other two blocks are controlled by a multinational consortium that also includes interests from China.

Rio’s involvement in Simandou has been under investigation by the UK Serious Fraud Office since 2017 over the payment in 2011 of US$10.5m to a French consultant.

The company is in negotiations with the SFO towards striking a deferred prosecution agreement, under which it would pay a fine and avoid going to trial, the Financial Times reported.

Jacques said the Simandou project “will happen with or without Rio Tinto involvement” due to growing demand from China for high-quality iron ore.

Rio was weighing its options given the company already produces high-quality ore from its mines in the Pilbara, he said.

Jacques said the coronavirus crisis meant the world was in “unprecedented times”.

However, he said China was enjoying a “very steep V-shaped recovery” and Rio’s iron ore order books were full.