Billionaire Gina Rinehart’s lawyers have argued a memo shows the heirs of mining pioneer Peter Wright have no claim to the Hope Downs mining project.

August 9, 2023

The descendants of mining pioneer Peter Wright have known for three decades they had no right to royalties from a massive mining project that helped make Gina Rinehart Australia’s wealthiest person, a court has been told.

Hancock Prospecting lawyer Noel Hutley SC said a 1989 memorandum to Mr Wright’s children, Angela Bennett and Michael Wright, also showed the family’s prospecting company did not have a share in Hope Downs assets in Western Australia’s northwest, as it has claimed.

The family’s company, Wright Prospecting, is fighting in the Supreme Court for multi-billion-dollar stakes in a series of Hope Downs tenements and royalties that Mr Wright and Ms Rinehart’s father, Lang Hancock, discovered in the 1950s.

“This is a memorandum which has obviously gone to the controlling mind of (Wright Prospecting),” Mr Hutley said on Wednesday as he directed Justice Jennifer Smith through the document.

“Interestingly, you will … see that the royalty listed under Mulga and Hope One to Three and Hope Two and Mystery is zero.

“There’s no royalty due and payable in respect of it.

“That, again, is wholly at odds with the contention advanced by Wright Prospecting in this case.”

Mr Hutley said if Wright Prospecting had believed it had a 50 per cent interest in the Hope Downs assets, it surely would have protested the memo’s assertion.

A week later, Wright Prospecting considered proposing that part of Hope Downs tenements, then known as East Angelas, be placed with the men’s partnership, known as Hanwright, the court was told.

“The proposal went nowhere but it is powerful evidence that (Wright Prospecting) did not regard East Angelas as a partnership asset,” Mr Hutley said.

Wright Prospecting has demanded a share of Hope Downs tenements and royalties amid a claim that it never relinquished the assets and Hancock Prospecting has breached a series of partnership agreements.

Hancock Prospecting maintains it undertook all the work, bore the financial risk involved in the development and is the legitimate owner of the tenements.

The high-stakes legal stoush also involves the family company of the late prospector Don Rhodes, DFD Rhodes, which claims it is entitled to 1.25 per cent royalty share of the production.

It says a deal was struck in the 1960s with Mr Hancock and Mr Wright in which the rights to ore-rich reserves in the Pilbara were handed over.

The Hope Downs mining complex near Newman is one of Australia’s largest and most successful iron ore projects, comprising four open-pit mines.

Ms Rinehart, the executive chair of Hancock Prospecting, secured the development of the mines after signing a deal in 2005 with Rio Tinto – which has a 50 per cent stake in the project – from mining tenements she took charge of after her father died in 1992.

Her two oldest children, John Hancock and Bianca Rinehart, are also represented at the hearing, where about two dozen lawyers are packing the Perth courtroom for the case, expected to run until November.

The siblings assert they are also entitled to a hefty share in the operation, which they say defeats both claims by Wright Prospecting and DFD Rhodes