Gina Rinehart’s bold farm sector expansion plans didn’t stop with the $365 million purchase of the S.Kidman and Company beef business in 2016. The mining magnate turned beef cattle queen has also thrown her support behind a high-tech fertiliser mining and processing project in the UK.
Two months ago, while Mrs Rinehart’s Hancock Prospecting joint venture Australian Outback Beef was making headlines in a bidding tussle for the Kidman business, she was also pumping almost $400m into a $5 billion phosphate mine being built 1500 metres under the North Yorkshire moors.
Last year proved a busy one for Hancock’s farm sector investment push, concluding in late December with Mrs Rinehart visiting the Adelaide offices of Kidman and Company, now officially part of AOB, the partnership with 33pc Chinese shareholder Shanghai CRED.
AOB has acquired two thirds, or about 77,000 square kilometres of the Kidman company’s outback beef estate which went on the market in April 2015.
Hancock Beef’s own cattle property assets, which already included holdings in Western Australia and central NSW, further expanded in 2016 with the purchase of Northern Territory properties “Riveren” and “Inverway” from short-lived Indonesian investors, and “Phoenix Park”.
Meanwhile, Mrs Rinehart has forecast her interest in WA-based, Bannister Downs Dairy, would result in a new processing centre by 2018.
