When it was reported that Western Australian Person of the Year, comedian, poet, Trumpette, mining billionaire, and frequent court-case haver Gina Rinehart’s company Hancock Prospecting was facing several challenges over royalties and ownership of the Hope Downs mine, both from the company of her father’s late business partner, Peter Wright, and two of her own children, we knew that the fresh insights into how really, really, ridiculously rich people live would be priceless. Here’s a few of the wildest details to emerge so far.
Letters straight from your heart
Christopher Withers SC, the lawyer representing Rinehart’s eldest children, John Hancock and Bianca Rinehart, aired letters on Tuesday in which Hancock Prospecting patriarch Lang Hancock had “pleaded” with his daughter to “stop her barrage of criticisms” in the late 1980s.
“I would be pleased if you would leave me alone to live the rest of my peace,” he said in an April 1989 letter to her.
The criticism centred on a few things — what Rinehart referred to Hancock’s “reckless and possibly ruinous” business deals in Romania, and most especially, Hancock’s marriage to the family’s housekeeper Rose Lacson (later Porteous), who Rinehart allegedly referred to as an “Oriental concubine” and tried to have deported.
“Do you want to give your one-third to a Filipino prostitute?” Rinehart said in a letter to her father in the mid-1980s, referring to his stake in Hancock Prospecting.
Lest we see Hancock as any kind of victim — and a quick Google of his views on Indigenous affairs would put paid to that — we might remember other correspondence between the pair, revealed during an earlier court case, where Hancock bitterly called Rinehart a “slothful, vindictive and devious baby elephant”, adding “I am glad your mother cannot see you now”.
Wait … Romania?
It’s a shock to the system to be reminded just when these potentially ruinous dealings in Romania were going on. The man Hancock was negotiating with was Nicolae Ceaușescu, possibly the most brutal and repressive Stalinist dictator since the original, who was at that time adding “starvation” to the list of privations and brutalities he had inflicted on his people during his 24-year reign, imposing severe austerity while he built himself one of the world’s largest palaces. This was all going on in 1988 when Hancock, with the backing of then Western Australian premier Peter Dowding, organised to sell billions in iron ore to the country.
Indeed, Ceaușescu was a great deal more popular in Australian political circles than he was with his own people: Dowding’s predecessor Brian Burke had visited the despot to spruik Pilbara iron ore a year earlier, and Queensland’s own Aldi tyrant Joh Bjelke-Petersen invited Ceausescu to 1988’s World Expo in Brisbane.
A tangled web
According to their lawyers, Rinehart engaged in a “calculated and deliberate fraud” of her own children by transferring the rights to valuable mining tenements away from them in the 1990s. “We don’t use the word fraud lightly,” Withers said. “The events after Lang died constitute an egregious fraud orchestrated by Gina and carried out by people who did whatever Gina wanted without questioning.”
The Rinehart children’s lawyers are arguing that their mother orchestrated a “false narrative” that her father breaching his fiduciary duty and mismanaged Hancock Prospecting, moves which she had not been aware and which “Gina had to clean up”.
They argue that the bitter correspondence noted above contained evidence that contradicted the claims by Hancock Prospecting lawyers last week that Rinehart had been kept in the dark by her father as he moved lucrative Hope Downs tenements out of the company and into another so as to ultimately create a stream tax-free income for himself.
Unbothered. In her lane. Flourishing
Rinehart has not been attending court. On Monday, she instead delivered a speech to The Australian’s Bush Summit, just over a kilometre away from the state’s supreme court where her family history is once again being dragged into the light. Among other things, Rinehart hit out at the perception she had fallen out with her father, saying she had reconciled with her father before he died in 1992.
“It’s saddening that media likes to ignore the good if you’re successful and not a socialist,” she added.
