Gina Rinehart Retains Richest Person in Australia Title With $22B Wealth

Even though a Walton took her crown away as the richest woman in the world, Australian mining magnate Gina Rinehart is still the country's richest person, the BRW magazine confirmed on Wednesday.

With a personal wealth of $22 billion, her money is more than double the fortune of the second richest person in Australia, Frank Lowy, the co-founder and chairman of Westfield, an international shopping mall developer. He has an estimated wealth of $6.87 billion, which went up by $400 million in the last 12 months.

While Ms Rinehart's wealth actually did shrink from $29.17 billion in 2012, she still would be far from losing her title richest person in Australia.

"Obviously (Mrs Rinehart) is still clearly and by some margin the richest in Australia and I don't think she will lose that any time soon but like a lot of miners, she's been hit by lower commodity prices," Telegraph quoted BRW editor James Thomson.

The decline of commodity prices also affected other miners, reducing their wealth by about 30 per cent, he added.

Ms Rinehart is the 41^st richest person in the world, a listing of billionaires released last week by Bloomberg said. The top position was grabbed back by Microsoft founder Bill Gates from Mexican telecom tycoon Carlos Slim, who held the top spot for several years.

Gone from the BRW list are Nathan Tinkler, the coal mining magnate who had several debt problems that shrank his wealth to $235 million from $915 million, and Therese Rein, the wife of former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, reducing the number of females in the Rich 200 list to 14 from 16 in 2012.

While Ms Rinehart is swimming in a lot of mining money, she is also being drenched by a lot of family problems as two of her four adult children want to remove her as head of the family trust that controls 25 per cent of Hancock Prospecting.

Their very public feud, which Ms Rinehart tried to suppress, is causing embarrassment to the wealthy family. With her fortune, it was easy for Ms Rinehart to give her daughter Bianca $300 million as out-of-court settlement for the short-of-cash estranged child to drop out of the lawsuit she and two other siblings filed against their mother.