Billionaire Richard Pratt’s mistress Shari-Lee Hitchcock settles legal claim against Pratt’s family

WHILE it is cardboard billionaire Richard Pratt’s love child Paula who is poised to inherit a $23 million slice of her late father’s empire, it was her mother, Shari-Lee Hitchcock, who was making headlines.

Shari-Lea Hitchcock at the Birdcage during 2008 Derby Day at Flemington Racecourse in Melbourne, Victoria.

WHILE it is cardboard billionaire Richard Pratt’s love child Paula who is poised to inherit a $23 million slice of her late father’s empire, it was her mother, Shari-Lee Hitchcock, Pratt’s mistress of more than a decade, who was making headlines yesterday after settling a longstanding legal claim against Pratt’s family.

Hitchcock brought the action against Pratt’s widow Jeanne in 2010, the year after Pratt died of prostate cancer leaving a fortune worth an estimated $5.5 billion making him, in 2009, the country’s fourth richest man.

Hitchcock claimed she and Paula had not been adequately provided for in Pratt’s will.

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Shari-Lee Hitchcock

Paula, who was 11 when her father, a part-time figure in her life with another family and a busy business life in Melbourne, died, was left a Watson’s Bay harbourside home valued conservatively in the current market at $15 million, a rural property on the NSW south coast and a parcel of private shares valued at $22.8 million in 2009.

By comparison Hitchcock was left, it was reported, only a rural property and a sum of cash.

For the past five years Hitchcock has been pushing on with her claim for a larger share, distracted only briefly from her cause in 2014 when a second Pratt mistress emerged.

When sex worker Madison Ashton took the Pratt family to court in 2013, a shrewd Hitchcock found herself a seat in the Supreme Court to witness the proceedings a year later.

She would later quip, having managed to slip away from the court virtually undetected: “I’m not sure that (Ashton) could have seen me anyhow from behind those giant lips of hers.”

Proving herself to be familiar with Ashton’s claim, Hitchcock added that if Ashton “really was the de facto ... she could have gone through the Family Provisions Act, but this didn’t happen.”

In the intervening years since turning her back on her former life as a part-time model to take up with Pratt in 1991 as his Sydney-based mistress, Hitchcock has had little enough success as a businesswoman. Attempted careers as a law clerk, an actor and a dotcom entrepreneur all failed. Her latest venture, as a horse trainer, seems to have met with minimal success.

With Hitchcock, 45, complying with strict confidentiality conditions concerning her settlement, speculation was rife about how much she had finally won from the Pratts with most of the firm view that $5 million would have been sufficient to persuade her to drop her case.