Billionaires lock horns in bitter battle for iron ore riches
Australia’s richest person Gina Rinehart and the nation’s fourth-richest woman, Angela Bennett, square off on Monday to settle their differences in a dispute over billions of dollars in iron ore assets and royalties.
They are the billionaire daughters of two schoolmates-turned-business partners who pegged mining tenements that decades later have produced wealth beyond their wildest dreams.
Gina Rinehart and Lang Hancock in 1982. Fairfax Media
Who knows what their long dead fathers, iron ore industry pioneers Lang Hancock and Peter Wright, would think of the legal battle. The two men formed their partnership with a handshake.
The biggest courtroom available at the David Malcolm Justice Centre in Perth has been set aside to accommodate some 20 barristers involved in a trial set to run for four months. The two main protagonists appear unlikely to set foot in court.
To indicate the size of the royalty prize alone, Rinehart’s private company Hancock Prospecting had $4.8 billion accrued from Hope Downs mines owned in partnership with Rio Tinto, sitting in bank accounts at June 30 last year, waiting to be divvied up with her four children.
A big chunk of that $4.8 billion, and billions more through future royalties and an equity stake in Hope Downs mines in the pipeline, could eventually end up in the hands of Bennett and her nieces Leonie Baldock and Alexandra Burt if they come out on top in the trial instigated by their private company Wright Prospecting in 2013.
To add even more intrigue, Rinehart’s children have been joined to the proceedings by Wright Prospecting.
Two of them, John Hancock and Bianca Rinehart, will run their own legal argument suggesting they are the rightful owners of Hancock Prospecting’s 50 per cent
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