Gina Rinehart: 'I wasn't prepared for the chaos left by my father.'

By Greg Hassall.

Gina Rinehart was unprepared for the chaos in which she found the family business after her father’s death in 1992, she reveals in part two of Australian Story’s profile of the Hancock dynasty.

“The business was in a very difficult state when I first took over the company,” she said.

“I walked into a situation where cheques were getting written, popped in drawers, so that when people phoned up they could honestly say, look, we’ve signed the cheque, you’ll get it ultimately.

“It was really a bit beyond my ability to cope with so many volcanoes happening at once.”

Mrs Rinehart was groomed from an early age to take over Hancock Prospecting but she and her father Lang Hancock fell out during the last decade of his life, after he married Rose Lacson.

John Singleton, a long-time family friend, said Hancock took his eye off the ball in the latter years of his life.

"Lang was distracted during the Rose period," he said.

"His drive had gone. I think he lost his dream and he lost his ambition."

Mr Singleton said when Gina Rinehart returned to the company following her father's death she was driven by a desire to make up for what she perceived to be lost years.

"She would have looked at that period and thought 'Dad, Dad, Dad'," he said.

"Gina wanted to prove to her dad, even though he was no longer here, that he should never have wasted that time, that he should have spent that time with her during a transition period so much more could have been done.

"When Gina took over the family business she set about doing it the way that she thought it should have been done and would have been done if she'd been there the whole time.

"And she's done that."

Mrs Rinehart said her father was so desperate to start his own mine he had entered into risky ventures the company could not afford.

"He'd made an arrangement in Russia that if we spent money fixing up their steel mill they'd buy the ore for the steel mill," she said.

"The trouble was the steel mill was in such a mess that it would've cost us hundreds of millions."

She recalled a nerve-wracking trip to Russia to get out of the deal.

"I took somebody who was supposed to stay in the meeting with me and [he] was so frightened his hair was up and he kept going off to vomit or whatever in the bathroom," she said.

"It was a very frightening experience because I wasn't sure about getting out of the country after delivering a very difficult message [of] 'we can't do this'."

It is often noted that Mrs Rinehart resents the label "heiress".

Although the extent of the company's financial difficulties when she took over were often disputed, she is adamant it was a very difficult time.

"We were pretty cash-strapped for all those years when I took over," she said.

"There are all these nonsense stories about having all this money.

"Yes, thank God, we did have the royalties, but most of those were going to pay off previous disasters."

This post originally appeared on the ABC and was republished here with full permission. 

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