Australia’s richest person Gina Rinehart engaged in a “calculated and deliberate fraud” of her own children by transferring away from them the rights to valuable mining tenements in the 1990s, their lawyers claim.

The mining magnate breached her fiduciary duty by transferring the ownership of Pilbara tenements from a company that her children would one day control and benefit from into the control of Hancock Prospecting, Christopher Withers, SC, alleged.