The last positive memory John Hancock has of his mother,Gina Rinehart, is a meal they shared together almost 20 years ago.
It was at the Perth office of Hancock Prospecting, and Rinehart’s private chef cooked them a meal of lambs’ brains – a shared favourite.
“We had a nice dinner, and actually we had a chuckle,” Hancock tells Guardian Australia at his rental apartment in Perth, within spitting distance of Cottesloe beach.
It was a brief detente in what has otherwise been more than two decades of legal feuding between the pair, since relations broke down when John was in his mid 20s.
Hancock, speaking to Guardian Australia in an in-depth interview for the podcast series, Gina, recalls the time when his mother “totally cut me off” after he had signed a document relating to a settlement between his mother and her stepmother Rose Porteous.
“Very shortly after that – a matter of days – she then said to me, ‘John, you’re not needed any more.’ And I’m like: what?
“That was it. I had walked into her office one day, then it all started happening – I didn’t get the company salary any more, my finger scan to get into the office was removed.”
Now, as the fate of Rinehart’s multibillion-dollar iron ore empire is set to be decided by Western Australia’s supreme court, Hancock says his relationship with his mother is “virtually nonexistent”.
“I haven’t seen her in person, other than in the courtroom, and we didn’t speak then. We’re not even emailing.”
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These days, Hancock lives in London with his wife, Gemma, and their three children. He says he made the move overseas to try to insulate his family from the personal toll the case has taken on him since he first started asking questions about a family trust in 2004.
“I’ve done my best to shelter my kids from it. We’ve moved overseas and have been [there] for more than 10 years. I knew that it wouldn’t be a good environment for my kids, and so we left,” he says.
The resulting lack of relationship between his children and their grandmother –who has been Australia’s richest personfor 11 of the past 15 years – is one he does not regret, although he says he remains disappointed he does not have a “normal mother”.
“I’m happier that she’s not part of their lives,” he says.
“I’m not so worried about my life. It’s making sure my children don’t have to go through what I have, and that’s a very big battle.”
The big battle Hancock has been waging with his mother goes back to 2004, when he first began asking Rinehart about a trust that was set up by his grandfather, Lang Hancock, before his death.
The trust left 49% of Hancock Prospecting to the grandchildren. It was due to be inherited by them when the youngest grandchild turned 25.
Three days before the trust was due to vest,the children received advice from Rinehartthat they would face bankruptcy if they accepted their inheritance. She wanted to change the vesting date until 2068. John would have been 92.
“I smelled a rat immediately,” Hancock says, describing what happened as a “disgraceful situation”.
“We didn’t find out the true depth of the subterfuge until years later, and that’s when we got documents that showed the background, the genesis of that letter that we received, three days before the trust was to vest,” he said.
Questions over the trust eventually spilled into legal action, with Rinehart stepping down as trustee and a judge declaring: “I have never seen such pressure exerted, so persistently, on a litigant, as has been apparent in this case,” in reference to Rinehart.
The judge noted in his decision that the mining magnate had incorrectly told the children that they would receive a massive capital tax gains bill that would bankrupt them if they received their inheritance. In fact, evidence before the court showed that Rinehart and her company’s chief financial officer at the time had already received advice that the tax wouldn’t necessarily apply.
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But while John and his sister Bianca Rinehart secured a victory over Rinehart in their first legal stoush against her, it proved just to be the start of a much longer – and potentially more consequential – legal battle between them.
For more than a decade,they have been part of a separate and very complex court casethat revolves around how Hancock Prospecting’s valuable royalty streams and mining profits in the Pilbara should be shared.
The case was instigated by the family of Lang Hancock’s long-term business partner Peter Wright and others, who are also staking a claim to a share of the billions of dollars that have flowed since the two prospectors pegged out much of the Pilbara. Both Gina and her children deny those claims.
The stakes are high, with the foundations of Rinehart’s $40bn empire in play.
Legal counsel for Hancock and Bianca separately argue that Hancock Prospecting has certain mining assets “because of a fraud perpetrated by Gina and Hancock Prospecting on Gina’s children”. Rinehart and Hancock Prospecting deny any wrongdoing and have declined to comment on the case to Guardian Australia given a judgment is imminent.
Rinehart’s lawyers say her actions in moving mining licences back to her company were righting a historic wrong by her father, Lang Hangcock.
As he reflects on the complex case, Hancock admits it is “exhausting” thinking about the turn of events that have defined most of his adult life.
But as his legal dispute with his mother continues, on a personal level, Hancock says he feels let down by her.
“It just goes against what anyone would expect a mother to want for their children. And I know the way I am with my children: anything I can do to help them or that’s advantageous to them, I would do my best to do,” he says.
“And when there’s someone in a position of such great wealth [who] then refuses, or does the opposite, says negative things about their children in the media … I think that’s very wrong.”
Hancock says the family breakdown has been stressful.
“I don’t deny a glass of wine will help me through some of the stress,” he says. “But I think you’ve got to maintain a lot of mental strength when you’re in a battle as big as this and against the forces that are against me.”
Without his wife, he says things could have been a lot worse.
“I think if you had dealt with all the pain that my mother’s given me over the years, you wouldn’t be able to live life. You’ve got to try and … sometimes forget about it. I think if you dwell on it too much … I don’t think that’s a very good place to be.”
Hancock says his mother has always been “tough”, reflecting on an observation his grandfather, Lang Hancock, made when he once said his daughter was tougher than him.
“It’s almost like that dissociative ability. I guess that’s mental toughness, but I think that being able to just have no feeling on what you might be doing to someone else, I think personally, that is tough. Like, I don’t think I could be that tough either,” he says.
“But she’s tough. And look, she probably would have been a great soldier or something.
“Whatever’s in her way is just obliterated without further thought.”
Hear the interview with John Hancockon episode 4 of our podcast series about Gina Rinehart