Australia's richest woman is about to become world's richest

Australian mining magnate Gina Rinehart is about to become the richest woman in the world, according The Telegraph. She is the executive chair of Hancock Prospecting.

Rinehart is already worth $17bn (£11.2bn), according to Forbes. But her bank account is about to balloon just that bit bigger as Rio Tinto will have to pay her royalties of around AU$200m (£123m) following a dispute.

The richest woman in the world at the moment is 90-year-old Liliane Bettencourt, the heiress to the L’Oreal empire, who is worth $30bn (£19.7bn). She is the ninth richest person in the world, according to Forbes billionaires index. (Bill Gates has just knocked Carlos Slim Helu off the top spot as world’s richest person.)

Rinehart is 59 and already the richest woman in Asia-Pacific. Three of her four children have launched legal action against her to try to take control of the family empire, which Rinehart inherited from her father Lang Hancock.

Rinehart says that when she took on the company, it was suffering from debt, and that she didn’t inherit any money when he died more than 20 years ago.