Gina Rinehart’s children suffer courtroom setback

The family’s latest legal skirmish has drawn the ire of a Supreme Court justice in the process.

Gina Rinehart.

Two of Gina Rinehart’s children have failed in their attempts to gain access to dozens of documents and correspondence, with the latest legal skirmish drawing the ire of a Supreme Court justice in the process.

Mrs Rinehart’s two eldest children, John Hancock and Bianca Rinehart, are in a protracted legal battle with their mother and had gone to Western Australia’s Supreme Court to argue that they should be able to use more than 80 letters, faxes, emails, memorandums and meeting minutes to help advance their case.

They included significant volumes of correspondence between Mrs Rinehart, Hancock Prospecting and their various lawyers and legal teams that they have used over the years, many of which dated back some 30 years, and emails and email chains between Mrs Rinehart and her son John.

John and Bianca Rinehart.

In her decision rejecting the children’s application, Justice Natalie Whitby lamented the inordinate amount of court resources consumed in dealing with the matter.

“The hearing of the applications occurred over six days. The court book for the hearing comprised just over 6000 pages. The parties referred to approximately 160 authorities. To say that the resources dedicated to these privilege applications was grossly disproportionate to the issues in dispute is an understatement,” Justice Whitby wrote.

The documents sought by the pair included an email sent to Mrs Rinehart by Alan Camp – a former lawyer and employee of Hancock and Mrs Rinehart – in which he set out his views on a range of issues including the relationship between Mrs Rinehart and her son, the underlying merits of John’s claims against his mother, and his support for John.

Hancock Prospecting and Mrs Rinehart argued that the email and 12 other documents related to Mr Camp were either wholly or partly privileged because they were prepared for the dominant purpose of seeking legal advice.

While John and Bianca argued that privilege had either not been established or had been waived over the documents, Justice Whitby rejected their challenges as “without merit”.

Bianca Rinehart.

Numerous ongoing legal battles have been fought within and between the families of WA iron ore pioneers Lang Hancock and Peter Wright since they first identified the rich iron ore potential of the state’s Pilbara region.

The application for documents stemmed out of one of the biggest of those battles, which took place in the WA Supreme Court last year when Wright Prospecting attempted to secure interests in the multibillion-dollar East Angelas and Hope Downs iron ore projects. The decision in that case is yet to be handed down.

John Hancock and Bianca Rinehart were also parties in that matter, with Bianca maintaining a presence in the courtroom for large parts of the marathon trial.

Separately, Wright family scion Julian Wright earlier this month launched a High Court challenge looking to overturn previous rulings that he was not entitled to reclaim his share of the Wright Prospecting empire despite having been “defrauded” out of his interest by his siblings.