Gina Rinehart succeeds in keeping family trust court spat private

Australia’s richest person, Gina Rinehart, has succeeded in keeping her legal battle with family members private, after a judge ruled that the family’s right to deal with the dispute without media coverage outweighed public interest in the case.

Rinehart is being sued in the Supreme Court of New South Wales by members of her family, including her daughter Hope Rinehart Welker. The case relates to the family’s trust, of which Rinehart is the trustee and her four children are beneficiaries.

It was revealed yesterday that the family in 2007 signed a deed which required family members to deal with disputes through mediation and arbitration, rather than through the courts.

Justice Brereton yesterday noted that this and previous family spats had attracted significant publicity.

“This is not the first occasion of discord in the family, which has immense wealth, no small part of which resides in the trust,” Justice Brereton said.

“In the past, the affairs of the family, including such discord, has attracted considerable publicity in the media.”

“Even the sparse details so far available of this litigation – amounting to little more than that proceedings between the parties are on foot and that the present application is pending in them – have attracted widespread publicity.”

He added that the family deed seemed to have been motivated in part by “an appreciation that stability and confidentiality were highly desirable in the context of sensitive commercial negotiations pertaining to the assets and undertaking of the corporate in which the trust holds shares.”

”The purposes of the provisions for confidential mediation and arbitration included an avoidance of the public airing of disputes, with the concomitant potential for that to undermine confidence of others dealing with the trust or the parties in their sensitive commercial arrangements.”

Justice Brereton also said the case “is and always was a family dispute, about interests in and governance of a family trust.”

“No questions of public significance or importance appear to arise.”

He added: “While the apparent urgency of the surrounding circumstances may well have seemed at the time to justify that course, it now appears – unbeknownst to the plaintiffs and those acting for them – the urgency had been removed by a step taken by the defendant which accorded with what the plaintiffs sought.”

Rinehart is chairman of Hancock Prospecting, the Western Australian mining company founded by her late father Lang Hancock in 1952.

She is no stranger to the courts, having waged an 11-year battle for the control of Lang Hancock’s estate during the 1990s. Last year, she lost a nine-year legal stoush with descendants of Lang Hancock’s business partner Peter Wright.

Despite her known aversion to publicity, Rinehart has made investments in Fairfax Media and Ten Network of late, and spoken out against the Government’s plans for a mining tax and a carbon tax. Australia’s first female billionaire, Rinehart is famously angered by being labelled a “mining heiress”.

Her wealth was estimated by BRW magazine at $10.3 billion, underpinned by soaring iron ore royalties over the past decade.

Hope Rinehart Welker is believed to live in Sydney with her 29-year-old husband Ryan Welker. Ryan is on the board of Mineral Resources, in which Hancock Prospecting has a stake.

Gina Rinehart’s son John changed his surname from Rinehart to Hancock in 2007 after a falling out with his mother, although last year was quoted as saying he had been welcomed back into the family. Daughter Bianca, once touted as the potential leader at Hancock, lives in Darwin.

The case was adjourned until September 21.