As the once-formidable 50-year alliance between mining moguls Lang Hancock and Peter Wright began to crumble, Hancock had a message for his schoolfriend-turned-business partner that now reads like a premonition.
The ageing pioneers had spent much of the early 1980s butting heads while attempting to carve up the mining assets they had acquired over swathes of Western Australia’s premier iron ore heartland.
“We have to do our best to solve the problem now rather than pass it on to the next generation,” Hancock wrote to Wright.
But efforts to stave off a bitter tug-of-war over assets that would elevate their descendants to the top of the country’s rich-list were futile.
And on Monday, about two dozen barristers will assemble across two courtrooms as the multibillion-dollar row over rights to the pair’s most lucrative legacy becomes the problem of the Supreme Court.
In the final trial of a lawsuit that has dragged on for more than a decade, Hancock’s daughter Gina Rinehart and the family empire she rebuilt will go head-to-head with Wright’s multi-billionaire daughter Angela Bennett, his late son Michael’s billionaire children, Leonie Baldock and Alexandra Burt, and the heirs to the estate of often-forgotten prospector Don Rhodes, who is alleged to have had his own deal with the original magnates.
Rinehart’s children, John Hancock and Bianca Rinehart, have been roped into the stoush courtesy of their own protracted legal battle over assets their grandfather allegedly left to them and their half-sisters, Ginia and Hope.
At the heart of Wright Prospecting’s lawsuit lodged in 2010 is the claim that both parties were supposed to share equally in the spoils of any ‘Hanwright’ partnership assets developed.
And it has its sights set on the steady stream of royalties flowing from the sprawling Hope Downs tenement Hancock Prospecting co-owns with operator Rio Tinto, home to four operational iron ore mines deemed the country’s most successful.
Under the terms of the partnership deal inked, Wright claims it is entitled to half, and the beneficiaries of Rhodes’ estate believe they should get a cut of 1.25 per cent, too.
The stoush over ownership of East Angelas, which has come to be known as Hope Downs 4, 5 and 6, was brought into the fold several years in, tenements which were stripped from the partnership by the state government in the 1980s only to be clawed back by Hancock Prospecting.
The row has seen the descendants of mining pioneers Lang Hancock and Peter Wright pitted against each other for several decades.Credit: Graphic: Stephen Kiprillis.
Wright believes the tenements belong to the partnership and the family are entitled to any funds derived from their development.
They’re assets worth the decade-long fight, with the royalties from Hope Downs expected to be worth hundreds of millions of dollars and those flowing out of East Angelas tipped to be several billion.
Rinehart, estimated to be worth an eye-watering $34 billion, insists the assets and their spoils belong to the once-embattled company she inherited and turned on its head.
The parties have been warring for the better part of two decades, amassing 50-plus court judgments while wrangling over their respective stakes in their fathers’ finds.
Monday marks the beginning of a trial expected to span several months, which has been beset by delays, in good part because of the private arbitration between Rinehart and her children over their claim they were entitled to 49 per cent of Hope Downs.
And the details of that private row are expected to become public, after Rinehart lost a last-ditch attempt to secure confidentiality orders that would stop her children airing details of the family’s ongoing feud.
On Wednesday, Hancock Prospecting’s lawyer Noel Hutley told the court multiple deeds Bianca and John signed almost two decades earlier meant the pair had a contractual obligation to deal with any disputes behind closed doors.
With an arbitration with her children to rule on the deeds still under way, Hutley argued a confidentiality order should remain in place until the finalisation of the case.
Justice Jennifer Smith, however, shot it down.
While noticeably absent from the lengthy list of parties involved, Peter’s third child, Julian, could stand to benefit should Wright Prospecting be successful.
But only if his November push to have a ruling that has kept him out of the family estate overturned triumphs.
Often referred to as the family’s black sheep, Julian has been fighting to reclaim the one-third stake in Wright Prospecting he sold to his late brother Michael Wright and sister Angela Bennett in 1987 for the past six years.
And with those now leading his father’s company wrestling for billions in royalties, the stakes have never been higher.
Smith, the second judge to preside over the row, will be under pressure to deliver a verdict before retiring in mid-2024.
But with two decades worth of legal battles between them and an endless pot of resources, one thing is for certain: it’s unlikely either side will leave any ruling uncontested.
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