Rinehart family dispute consumes high-stakes WA mining trial
The Rinehart circus rolled into Perth this week. The long-running family dispute had proven a colourful sideshow in the opening stages of the Hancock Prospecting v Wright Prospecting legal battle, but was quickly about to become the main event.
As the trial between two of Australia’s richest mining families entered its fourth week, Bianca Rinehart made an unexpected arrival at the WA Supreme Court on Monday morning, sending camera crews scrambling.
Bianca Rinehart is flanked by lawyers, on left Christopher Withers, SC. Trevor Collens
Just 800 metres up the road, her mother Gina Rinehart – Australia’s richest person – was due to deliver a rare speech at a regional summit.
Their duelling media appearances set the tone for an extraordinary week of revelations that provided rare insight into a bitter, years-long family dispute.
The Supreme Court heard claims that Mrs Rinehart had defrauded her young children in the 1990s, with lawyers alleging she moved valuable mining tenements out of a company they would one day benefit from and into the control of Hancock Prospecting.
Scores of old letters exhumed in the trial’s mammoth discovery process were read out to court. They revealed Mrs Rinehart had labelled her then step-mother Rose Porteous an “Oriental concubine”, and questioned her father Lang Hancock’s “reckless and possibly ruinous” scheme to sell ore to Romania.
Gina Rinehart appears at the Bush Summit on Monday. Trevor Collens
Hancock, a Pilbara icon, later begged his daughter to stop what was described as a barrage of criticism over his romantic and business interests in the years leading up to his death, so he could “live the rest of my life in peace”, the court heard.
Correspondence exchanged between family lawyers
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