Gina Rinehart 'taking children to court again' in ongoing family feud
Australia's richest woman Gina Rinehart is reportedly taking her children to court again in an attempt to block them from accessing millions of dollars in royalties from a new venture between Hancock Prospecting and Rio Tinto.
The mining magnate filed the motion in the Federal Court last month against the trust that manages the inheritance of her four children - John Hancock, Bianca Rinehart, Hope Welker and Ginia Rinehart, the Sydney Morning Herald reported.
The litigation comes days after Mrs Rinehart joined forces with Chinese real estate company Shanghai Cred in a bid to buy the S Kidman & Co cattle empire for $365 million.
The billionaire's two eldest children, Bianca and John, launched legal action against their mother in 2011 and accused her of "deceptive, manipulative and disgraceful conduct" after they claimed she changed the date they could access the trust from September 2011 to 2068.
Bianca was appointed trustee after a four year legal battle in the NSW Supreme Court.
She is reportedly using her trustee position to obtain documents and prove Mrs Rinehart engaged in misconduct while in charge of the Hope Margaret Hancock Trust.
However, Mrs Rinehart has withheld she managed the trust appropriately and the allegations from her children have no basis of fact.
Ginia, Mrs Rinehart's youngest daughter, sided against her siblings and claimed the legal action was "motivated entirely by greed".
Mrs Rinehart’s Hancock Prospecting and Shanghai CRED Real Estate Stock announced earlier this week their flagged deal with S. Kidman & Co, which requires approval under Australia’s foreign investment regime.
The proposed transaction carves out properties near sensitive defence sites whose location contributed to the scuppering of an earlier proposal for Kidman to be sold to Shangahi CRED and another Chinese company.
The Anna Creek station and The Peake in South Australia would be sold to other Australian grazing interests.
The Kidman properties span 101,000sqkm across three States and the Northern Territory, and include the Kimberley’s Ruby Plains station, grazing 185,000 cattle. The empire has been held by the Kidman family for 117 years.
Hancock would take a 67 per cent stake in Kidman. Shanghai CRED’s 33 per cent stake would be lower than Kidman’s current foreign ownership of 33.9 per cent.
The deal comes after Mrs Rinehart added three WA cattle stations to her pastoral portfolio in recent years.
The iron ore billionaire said she looked forward to working with Kidman to grow and develop the operations.
Mrs Rinehart is the head of Hancock Prospecting, an oil and iron ore mining company. She is worth over $29 billion and was named the world's wealthiest woman - growing $1 million richer every half hour.
