Inside WA’s battle for billions as Gina Rinehart and rival heirs await defining verdict on iron ore fortune

After more than a decade of courtroom warfare, Gina Rinehart is facing a defining moment that could reshape her mining empire and test her standing as Australia’s richest person, as a judgment looms in a bitter fight with rival heirs and members of her own family.

A ruling to be handed down in WA’s Supreme Court on Wednesday will decide who gets paid, and how much, from some of the country’s richest iron ore royalty streams, with billions of dollars at stake.

The case, which has been afoot since 2010, centres on claims by Wright Prospecting and DFD Rhodes that they are entitled to a share of lucrative royalty streams generated by Hancock Prospecting’s Hope Downs operation, a vast iron ore project co-owned by Rio Tinto in WA’s Pilbara.

Those assets generate billions of dollars in revenue each year, with royalty streams widely understood to be worth hundreds of millions annually.

The dispute traces back to the partnership between Rinehart’s father, Lang Hancock, and fellow prospector Peter Wright, two school friends-turned-business partners who helped open up the Pilbara to iron ore mining.

Their alliance, dubbed the “Hanwright” partnership, formed the basis of early iron ore discoveries that would later underpin one of Australia’s largest private fortunes.

By the early 1980s, the relationship had begun to fracture as the pair clashed over how to divide their assets.

When the case was finally aired in court in 2023, correspondence and agreements between the pioneering prospectors were pored over to determine who was entitled to what – and how much their heirs would stand to inherit.

Hancock wrote to Wright: “We have to do our best to solve the problem now rather than pass it on to the next generation.”

But that never happened.

Wright Prospecting, backed by the descendants of Peter Wright including billionaire Angela Bennett and the children of Michael Wright, Peter’s oldest son, argues the original partnership entitled both sides to share equally in any assets from those discoveries.

The estate of another early prospector, Don Rhodes, represented by his company DFD Rhodes, has also made a claim, arguing it is entitled to a smaller share of about 1.25 per cent.

That claim is derived from the role Rhodes played in discovering the Hope Downs iron ore deposit, with the terms set out in an agreement inked in 1969.

However, Hancock Prospecting rejects the royalty claims from both Wright Prospecting and DFD Rhodes, maintaining it rebuilt the business and developed the projects after regaining control of key tenements from the state.

In July 2023, on the eve of the case being aired in court, Hancock Prospecting unsuccessfully attempted to have a confidentiality order hide more than 16,700 pages of documents.

Rinehart’s children stake their own claim on royalties

Rinehart’s eldest children, Bianca Rinehart and John Hancock, entered the legal battle in 2016 after launching their own long-running dispute with their mother over trust money and inheritance.

That private dispute has centred in part on claims they were entitled to as much as 49 per cent of Hope Downs.

In April 2024, the pair sought access to 82 confidential documents they believed could support their case – only for the Supreme Court to reject the bid as without merit.

Justice Natalie Whitby criticised the effort as a drain on court resources, noting the dispute over those documents took six days of hearings and involved a court book spanning 6000 pages.

Mining giant Rio Tinto, as the joint venture partner in Hope Downs, will also be impacted by the outcome, with potential ramifications for how joint-venture agreements are interpreted.

The long-running litigation has spanned more than a decade, involving more than 50 court rulings and hearings that ran for 51 days.

It has included counterclaims, disputes over closed versus open court proceedings and complex fights over evidence and privilege.

On Wednesday, the matter will finally come to a head when Justice Jennifer Smith hands down her decision.

However, volleys of appeals from all sides are anticipated to be filed as soon as the court adjourns, raising the prospect of the complicated and sprawling legal fight dragging on even longer.

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