Rinehart’s son couldn’t afford to service his car, court told

afr.com:

John Hancock’s years-long battle with his mother Gina Rinehart over the control of family assets put him under such financial stress that he struggled to pay for new car brake pads in the mid-2000s, his lawyers have claimed.

On Thursday the Western Australian Supreme Court heard Mr Hancock was met with “lies, bullying and intimidation” as he worked “heroically”, with limited resources, to uncover what he alleges was fraudulent activity by his mother, Australia’s richest person.

Legal correspondence from 2004 and 2005 revealed the extraordinary Rinehart family breakdown over a claim to valuable mining tenements in WA’s Hamersley Ranges, which is now the subject of a months-long trial.

Mr Hancock’s lawyer, Christopher Withers, SC, alleged his client faced fierce resistance and legal threats when he began questioning how the tenements came to be transferred in the 1990s from a company he and his siblings were beneficiaries of, into Hancock Prospecting, which Mrs Rinehart controlled.

Mr Withers claimed Mrs Rinehart defrauded her children and breached her fiduciary duty by moving those assets out of the company and into the control of Hancock Prospecting.

The court heard that lawyers for Mr Hancock asked that Mrs Rinehart and her company pay for some of his expenses and put money in his account to keep the wolf from knocking on the door in the mid-2000s, at a time he was also contemplating legal action against them.

“He didn’t have enough money to buy new brake pads for his car and service his car and that sort of thing,” Mr Withers said.

Gina Rinehart’s eldest children John Hancock and Bianca Rinehart. 

Mr Withers read from a letter that Mr Hancock’s legal team sent to one of Mrs Rinehart’s legal representatives in the