The richest woman in the
world, according to a respected business magazine, is not Oprah Winfrey,
Queen Elizabeth II or L'Oreal heiress Liliane Bettencourt. It's a
relatively unknown Australian mining magnate. So who exactly is Gina
Rinehart?
Asked once to sum up her concept of beauty, Gina Rinehart did not point to the pearls that so often adorn her neck. Nor did she rhapsodise about the ochre landscape of her
beloved Pilbara, a beautiful, if unforgiving, expanse of land in the
northwest corner of Australia.
Instead, she spoke of the unlovely commodity that has made
her family rich, and the giant holes in the ground from where it came.
"Beauty is an iron mine," she famously remarked.
When her father, Lang Hancock, discovered one of the world's
biggest reserves in the early 1950s, the export of iron ore was banned
in Australia because it was deemed such a scarce and finite resource.
Tens of thousands of iron ore
shipments later, royalty payments from that Pilbara mining field in
Western Australia continue to swell her coffers.
The Hancocks were not the sole beneficiaries. The
multi-billionaire fervently believes that her father's discovery also
made Australia prosperous, which partly drives her recent quest for
influence, gratitude and respect.
It is partly borne of a lifelong sense of grievance - that
Australia's traditional east coast elites have not recognised her
family's contribution to the country's development, nor the local media.
With an estimated net personal wealth of $A29 billion
($US29.3bn, £18.79bn), Rinehart has in recent years gone from being
Australia's richest woman to Asia's richest woman to arguably the
world's.
Australian business magazine BRW has named her the world's
wealthiest woman, and Citigroup has also predicted that the 58-year-old
businesswoman will soon top the global rich list, with more than $100bn
(£64.8bn) of assets to her name.
Source :BBC
The Richest Woman in the World
Reviewed by neneahuma
on
Tuesday, July 10, 2012
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