John Hancock 'never ruled out' deal with mother Gina Rinehart Australia's richest woman Gina Rinehart, chairman of Hancock Prospecting. JOHN Hancock has revealed he is still open to a settlement offer from his billionaire mum Gina Rinehart despite recent publicised vows to continue fighting her in the courts. In an interview with The Sunday Times this week, he also conceded he had already stepped away from a building material venture that he last year said would change how low-cost homes were constructed worldwide and even help address homelessness in the Third World. While recent media reports have him pledging to continue battling Mrs Rinehart for control of a family trust, and threatening her senior executives with "a day of reckoning," Mr Hancock said on Thursday he had never abandoned the possibility of cutting a deal with her. "Of course, I've never ruled it (a settlement) out, we're not doing it for fun are we?" he said. But he also said: "She (Mrs Rinehart) is not really one for settling, is she?" The Sunday Times understands there were settlement discussions between Mr Hancock and Mrs Rinehart's camp as recently as last year. Mr Hancock's sister, Hope Welker, this week dropped out of the action she launched in 2011 with him and their sister Bianca Rinehart, to remove Gina Rinehart as trustee of a multibillion-dollar trust set up for them by their late grandfather Lang Hancock in 1988. John Hancock said he had "no idea" if Mrs Welker had received a settlement when she withdrew from the case that mirrored a $300 million amount she was offered in 2011 by Mrs Rinehart. The Sunday Times believes the $300 million offered in 2011 may have been to buy Mrs Welker's shares in the trust. In May last year, Mr Hancock was spruiking his involvement as interim chief executive of Future Building Material Corporation whose revolutionary walling system, R9, he had said he would market for Australian public housing and also to help combat the Third World's homelessness problems. At the time he said of his role: "There's no turning back now." But by October 2012, only seven months after he started with the company, his involvement had ended. This week he said: "They (FBM) needed to raise money, which they now have, and I wasn't going to get in the way of them being able to get new investors, who wanted to basically come in and manage it themselves. Obviously they're putting up the money, they get to call the shots. I raised some money for the company, but it's going to need a lot more than I can do right now, when I'm also organising money for my lawyers.