Hancock moved assets ‘to fulfil Porteous’ desires’: Rinehart lawyer
Mining magnate Lang Hancock succumbed to pressure from his wife, Rose Porteous, and her desires to live a luxurious lifestyle, prompting him to wrongly transfer land now subject to a multibillion-dollar legal battle, a court has heard.
In extraordinary submissions by lawyers representing Hancock Prospecting, which is chaired by Mr Hancock’s daughter, Gina Rinehart, the WA Supreme Court heard he diverted major mining tenements out of the company’s control and into a separate company which he controlled.
Lang and Rose Hancock on his 82nd birthday.
Noel Hutley, SC, representing Hancock Prospecting, said his client “takes no joy” in reliving the events of the 1980s, but went about explaining Hancock’s alleged breaches of fiduciary duties through the period.
“It was a period in which he succumbed principally to the pressures of Rose Porteous and her desire for a luxurious lifestyle,” Mr Hutley told the court.
“That led to all the events we cover today and which Lang Hancock was diverted from his performance of his duties to [Hancock Prospecting] which resulted in diverting [the company’s] opportunities in Hope Downs and East Angeles.”
Mr Hutley claimed that Hancock later came to realise shortly before his death “the extent of his wrongdoing” and worked to reverse the changes he had made, but died before that could be completed.
The claims emerged in the third week of a high-stakes court battle between two of Australia’s richest mining families. The descendants of Mr Hancock’s business partner, Peter Wright, are seeking an equal share of riches that have flowed from the Hope Downs mining project.
Rose Porteous at her Mosman Park home in the western suburbs of Perth, Western Australia Tony McDonough
The court heard that as
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