Gina Rinehart does not like to lose. Engaged in bitter legal battles for most of the past 35 years, Australia’s richest person has shown her propensity to fight tooth and nail to retain control of her family’s iron ore empire – and the riches that flow from it.
Even as her own children were due to receive their inheritance from their grandfather Lang Hancock more than 20 years ago, Rinehart sought to block them in an ugly legal dispute that showed the lengths she was prepared to go to retain control. But as rain drizzled down on Perth’s central business district on Wednesday, Justice Jennifer Smith handed down a judgment that will force Rinehart to share.
Not just hundreds of millions of dollars in royalty payments pocketed by Hancock Prospecting, but also some of the credit for the making of the Pilbara iron ore industry. The atmosphere in the courtroom was tense as dozens of sharply dressed lawyers and the Western Australian media pack awaited a verdict that came almost two decades after the Wright family first launched a claim against Hancock Prospecting for its share of royalties from the Hope Downs mine complex.
In a dry and cursory judgment, Smith read out a short summary of her findings, drawn from a 1,655 page judgment on the 51-day trial that saw 4,000 documents submitted in argument. In the front row of the courtroom, which had to be revamped to manage the trial in 2023, sat three of Rinehart’s most loyal lieutenants, Sanjiv Manchanda, Garry Korte and Jay Newby.
In a sign of the case’s complexity – and the divisions within Rinehart’s family – the five-member clan had four separate legal representatives joining to hear the verdict via video link. At the crux of the dispute was whether an agreement between Peter Wright and Lang Hancock signed in the 1980s entitled the family to a share of the royalties flowing from the lucrative Rio Tinto – Hancock Prospecting joint venture project.
