Billionaire families’ Hancock-Wright legacy courtroom battle over iron ore mines starts today

It could be the most expensive family feud in Australia’s history.

On one side, the house of Hancock, with the legacy left behind by patriarch Lang still hanging over the state more than 30 years after his death.

On the other, the Wright family — challenging for the rights and royalties attached to the mines named after Lang’s first wife Hope.

And in the middle, John Hancock and Bianca Rinehart — children of Gina, grandchildren of Lang — and themselves combatants in a courtroom battle which has taken more than ten years to get to here.

Today, before Supreme Court judge Jennifer Smith, the most private of Perth families, running some of the country’s biggest private companies, will commence combat in public.

With reputations, legacies, histories — and not to mention billions of dollars — at stake.

The case of Wright Prospecting Pty Ltd vs Hancock Prospecting Pty Ltd centres around the mining pioneers, friends and partners whose names live on long after their lives ended.

Lang Hancock — whose apocryphal plane ride through the Hamersley Ranges is etched into WA folklore.

And Peter Wright, Hancock’s school friend turned business partner, once described by the bull-necked magnate as “the business head who was to do the financing — and I was to do the field work.”

Following that field work, Lang’s first claimed iron ore discovery was named after his first wife, 75 kilometres north-west of Newman and now comfortably among the ten biggest iron ore mines in the world.

Today, in conjunction with Rio Tinto, Hancock Prospecting mine Hope Downs for millions of tonnes of iron ore a year — worth billions of dollars.

And who owns what, and who owes who from that project, is what will be argued in court over the coming months

Since 2010, the family company of Wright — owned by billionaire heiress Angela Bennett and her relatives — have claimed they are entitled to half of the Hancock stake some parts of Hope Downs, and royalties from others.

Complicating that further is DFD Rhodes — the family company of late Pilbara trucker and prospector Don Rhodes — which is also claiming a 1.25 per cent royalty on Hope Downs production.

And then there are the children.