Gina: Richest Australian

Her story has all the trappings of a Hollywood potboiler — a genius prospector for a father, a rancorous relationship with her stepmother — a woman with a dubious past — and then a protracted fight for the family fortune. Fifty-seven-year-old Georgina 'Gina' Rinehart, an Australian mining magnate is likely to add one more chapter to her riveting story by becoming the richest person in the world.
According to a recent report by Citigroup Global Markets that appraised 400 greenfield mining projects across the world that are not yet operational, three of the 10 most promising mines are owned by Rinehart's firm Hancock Prospecting.
With booming commodity prices and the fact that Hancock Prospecting is almost entirely privately owned by Rinehart family trusts, the report tips her to exceed Carlos Slim's net worth (estimated at $74 billion). Currently the richest Australian, Rinehart's net worth is estimated to be in excess of $10 billion which has soared from $2 billion just a year ago.
Given her legendary reclusiveness, her India visit in June this year went largely unnoticed. But it managed to spark a controversy in Canberra. She has been in talks with India's GVK Group to sell-off a couple of coal assets in Queensland valued at $2.4 billion and was here to attend GVK Reddy's granddaughter's Rs 100-crore wedding in Hyderabad, with a couple of Australian parliamentarians in tow. MPs as guests at the wedding of an Indian business family that might do business in Australia — this sort of thing is a lot more frowned upon in Canberra than in New Delhi.
"I cannot comment at this stage apart from saying that we are still engaged in discussions with Hancock," says a GVK spokesperson, while an emailed query to Hancock remained unanswered at the time of going to Press.
The Rogue Bull
Rinehart's father Langley Hancock, a genius Western Australian bushman set up a mining empire from scratch against the severest odds in the 1960s. The Hancock family settled in the harsh western Australian outback in 1860s. "Dad enjoyed his childhood growing up in the bush, hunting dingoes, mustering sheep, fixing windmills, riding horses over thousands of miles and getting to know the area," wrote Rinehart in a 2010 essay on her father. In his early days as a prospector he had discovered small deposits of manganese, copper, asbestos and gold.
In 1952, the big breakthrough came when flying with his wife, he was forced due to storms to change course and fly low along the walls of a gorge. He saw extremely high hematite red walls. He went back there the following year, collected samples that showed the rocks had a higher iron content than the ore then used in the American steel industry. Although not many believed his claims, Hancock was convinced the red walls contained more than a billion tonnes of superior quality ore. It took him almost a decade to convince British mining giant Rio Tinto to partner with him to exploit the Pilbara (pronounced pil-bra) deposits. The project eventually produced 55 million tonnes of ore annually.
Hancock was a fierce libertarian and politically incorrect in the extreme. Nicknamed the rogue bull, he advocated lower taxes and secession by mineral-rich western Australia from the rest of the country. In the 1979 biography The Rogue Bull, Robert Duffield writes Hancock was of the firm belief that all real wealth was in the ground and societies become prosperous only by exploiting that wealth.
Father vs Daughter
Governments, on the other hand, he thought do not create wealth, they spend it. Among his many radical ideas was to sterilise mixed-race aborigines. He was a polarizing figure who was loathed for his rough-and-ready methods as much as he was feted as a pioneer. A young Rinehart shared most of her father's views. In a 1975 interview to the Australian Women's Weekly, she said she was wholly in favour of secession. "I don't like our State rights being grabbed by Canberra."
In 1983, Gina appointed Rose Lacson, a 34-year-old Filipina to look after her widowed father. Rose had a colourful past to say the least. She was married twice —forced the first time at gunpoint by a political strongman and then to a Malaysian who was a credit-card fraudster. Before landing in Australia, she worked as a pantyhose model.
Within a few months, the two, separated by 39 years, fell in love and eventually married much to Rinehart's chagrin. Rinehart herself was married twice — first to Greg Milton an Englishman and then to Frank Rinehart, a New York lawyer. Her relationship with Hancock completely broke down during his 10-year association with Rose. In a brilliant profile written by Australian author David Leser, which first appeared in the Good Weekend magazine in 1998, he accesses bitter correspondences between the stubborn father and daughter.
In one letter Hancock accuses his daughter of unwarranted interference in his life. "As for children being ashamed of me, I think they are more likely to feel embarrassed by being picked up from school by a young mother who has let herself go to the point where she is grossly overweight, so instead of listening to gossip and adding to it whilst interfering in my affairs, you would be better off to put your own house in order," he wrote. To Rinehart's accusation of fiduciary irresponsibility and giving the company's money away to his young wife, he asks her tersely to stop using any of the company's credit cards.
A protracted legal battle ensued between Rose and Rinehart after Hancock's death in 1992. Rose eventually retained a large part of her husband's estate while Rinehart gained control of the mining empire.
Keeping it Close
The shroud of secrecy around Hancock Prospecting has only increased under Rinehart's helmsmanship. She remains painfully media shy, having only spoken to the Press only twice or thrice in the last decade-and-a-half, despite owning a minority stake in Fairfax Media which owns The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age. One senior Australian journalist who has followed her businesses claims that Rinehart despite running a multiple-billion dollar empire never uses the services of external investment banks. All analyses and deals are done in-house.
Leser is one of the few journalists she has granted access. In his piece written, when she was in the midst of the inheritance battle, her associates describe the morale in the company as appalling. Employees despair at Gina's churlish and often whimsical behaviour, and her propensity for belittling others, including her son John who works in her company part-time. He further says: "Her bullying is often disguised by an unnerving little girl's voice which calcifies the moment she is crossed. Were it not for the high sums with which she attracts good advisers, her company's woes would be more readily apparent."
Imagine what a few score more billion will let her buy.
Source: economictimes.com