Annette Sharp: Pratt family’s business is a web of wealth and secrecy
News that Richard Pratt’s love-child Paula has launched an audacious bid to be included in the family trust indicates that she has inherited her father’s cool head for business, writes Annette Sharp.
NSW
Don't miss out on the headlines from NSW. Followed categories will be added to My News.
The apple of her mother’s eye, at least when they are on speaking terms, Paula Hitchcock looks to have inherited her father’s cool head for business, if not her mother’s proclivity for creating a stir.
The daughter of Sydney party girl-turned-horse trainer Shari-lea Hitchcock and her one-time married lover, billionaire cardboard king Richard Pratt, Paula made headlines this weekend after court records revealed she has launched an audacious bid to be included in the Pratt family trust.
That trust, Pratt Family Holdings Trust, has oversight of family assets and businesses associated with the Visy Industries titan — in particular ones located outside NSW and not listed in Pratt’s rather scant will.
Hitchcock’s mother contested the 2007 will following Pratt’s death in 2009, and in 2015 it was reported she and her then 17-year-old daughter had reached an undisclosed settlement with her ex-lover’s estate, overseen by his wife Jeanne.
The settlement was put at $100 million, which most believed was generous.
The sum, although just a drop in the ocean for a family of rich-listers worth tens of billions, appeared to finally bring down the curtain on the sordid scandal that, since 2000, had embroiled one of the nation’s most respected business families.
It was in 2000 that Paula Sarah Hitchcock’s birth was discovered, by chance, when an employee of Visy Industries bungled up to a male newspaper reporter he’d mistaken for a lawyer outside a Sydney courtroom with a parcel of hush money.
The money, a deposit on a $23,000 payment, was intended for then two-year-old Paula’s nanny, Julie Page, and was offered in part as an enticement to compel her to drop an AVO application listed to be heard at Waverley Local Court.
In her police statement, Page alleged Hitchcock had been abusive towards her. Hitchcock denied the allegations and made the counter claim that Page had stolen from her, which Page also denied. The AVO request was dropped.
The story would propel Pratt’s secret mistress and love child — and his mortified conservative private Melbourne family, including three half-siblings, Anthony Pratt, Heloise Waislitz and Fiona Geminder — into the spotlight.
Many believed that with the settlement of the Visy boss’s will, public interest in the story would dry up.
For a brief few years it appeared to.
Paula got on with her life and, after turning 21 in 2018, inherited a harbourside home in affluent Watsons Bay, a rural property on the South Coast, as well as many millions in company shares.
Her mother, too, was provided for.
The financial windfall brought Paula security and gave her the freedom to concentrate on her university studies in finance.
Soon a suitor presented himself.
Nassib Thoumi was a Sydney Uni commerce student and Westpac portfolios analyst six years her senior, whose physical likeness to Paula’s half-brother Anthony Pratt is striking.
By 2021, the loved-up couple were celebrating their engagement. The wedding announcement was said to have shocked the bride-to-be’s non-traditional mother.
The couple married in a lavish ceremony at Watsons Bay’s Our Lady Star of the Sea Catholic Church in February, 2022, the nervous 24-year-old bride, a vision in white lace.
Members of Richard Pratt’s family were conspicuously absent from the nuptials, as too was the mother-of-the-bride’s boyfriend, Dallan Nichols.
It wasn’t long before cracks were appearing in the relationship between one-time Australasia Post swimsuit model Shari-lea and her new son-in-law.
A simmering feud spilt into the public domain three months after the wedding when Hitchcock published to Facebook a note she claimed was from Thoumi.
In the note the author demands Hitchcock remove her horse from a property outside Nowra.
“Hi Shary (sic) just a reminder. Please have your horse removed off the property by Friday. The locks will be changed on Friday. You will not be granted access to the grounds after that. It will be removed if it is found on the property.”
Hitchcock blew-up and dubbed her new son-in-law a “trouble making man”.
The pair’s relationship, she said, was “beyond bad”.
“I’m worried my daughter married him,” she posted.
Since then mother and daughter are said to have been estranged.
Paula and Thoumi welcomed their first child, a red-haired daughter named Mary, late last year, though a post from Shari-lea suggested she has spent less time with the child than she might have hoped.
It’s not known whether new mum Paula has returned to her job at the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade.
Business records do show that in October last year Paula, calling herself Paula Sarah El Thoumi, ceased to be a director of Naula Pty Ltd, a company she and Thoumi set up in 2020.
Thoumi is now sole director of Naula, a role that sees him determinedly focused on growing the couple’s wealth.
Got a news tip? Email weekendtele@news.com.au
Public warned of unregistered botox injector after three hospitalised
A health warning has been issued about Norsafiza Binti Zakaria, who is accused of performing at-home cosmetic injections after three women were treated for suspected botulism.
Norco truck driver fighting for life as crash probe launched
A Norco milk truck driver is fighting for life in hospital after colliding with a ute on a major roadway near Coffs Harbour, with police launching a probe into the crash. Here’s the latest.