The paper contains two lines of results: the first one is a study of
symmetries and conservation laws of gl-regular Nijenhuis operators. We prove
the splitting Theorem for symmetries and conservation laws of Nijenhuis
operators, show that the space of symmetries of a gl-regular Nijenhuis operator
forms a commutative algebra with respect to (pointwise) matrix multiplication.
Moreover, all the elements of this algebra are strong symmetries of each other.
We establish a natural relationship between symmetries and conservation laws of
a gl-regular Nijenhuis operator and systems of the first and second companion
coordinates. Moreover, we show that the space of conservation laws is naturally
related to the space of symmetries in the sense that any conservation laws can
be obtained from a single conservation law by multiplication with an
appropriate symmetry. In particular, we provide an explicit description of all
symmetries and conservation laws for gl-regular operators at algebraically
generic points. The second line of results contains an application of the
theoretical part to a certain system of partial differential equations of
hydrodynamic type, which was previously studied by different authors, but
mainly in the diagonalisable case. We show that this system is integrable in
quadratures, i.e., its solutions can be found for almost all initial curves by
integrating closed 1-forms and solving some systems of functional equations.
The system is not diagonalisable in general, and construction and integration
of such systems is an actively studied and explicitly stated problem in the
literature