Olivia Mead, a millionaire heiress whose list of expenses included a $1.2m crystal-encrusted grand piano and $2,000 annual upkeep of her pet axolotl, has had her inheritance cut from $25m to $6.14m following an appeal from her deceased father’s estate.
The 22-year-old is the youngest daughter of the Perth mining billionaire Michael Wright, whose father, Peter Wright, was a business associate of the late Lang Hancock. He was worth $2.7bn upon his death in 2012.
Mead was not publicly connected to the powerful Wright family or her half-siblings until she challenged her father’s will, arguing that it did not adequately provide for her needs.
She had originally been bequeathed a $3m trust fund that she would be able to access once she turned 30, provided she did not become an alcoholic, be convicted of a crime, knowingly have “any involvement or association whatsoever” with illicit drugs, or convert to any faith other than “traditional” Christian options.
The supreme court found in Mead’s favour in early 2015 and increased her inheritance eight-fold to $25m, an amount the court’s master, Craig Sanderson, said would “not fall outside of the reasonable expectation of most members of the community”.
It was more than the $20m Mead had demanded, which her lawyers had revised down to $12m before the surprise decision.
Wright’s estate, acting on behalf of Wright’s much older children from his second marriage, filed an appeal one month later.
On Wednesday, the full bench of the Western Australian supreme court set aside Sanderson’s orders, ruling that while Sanderson was correct to say that Mead had been inadequately provided for in the original will: “The exercise of his discretion to order that provision be made for the respondent in the sum of $25m was flawed.”
In a lengthy written judgment, the court found that Sanderson made a number of “material errors” in calculating the size of Mead’s inheritance, saying the focus should have been on what constituted “proper maintenance” and that the initial finding that Mead was “honest” and “not a gold-digger” were not relevant.
“The capital sum should be sufficient to enable the respondent to purchase a reasonably substantial house with part of the capital sum and to invest the balance so that she will receive a reasonably substantial annuity for the remainder of her life,” the appeal court’s president, Michael Buss, said.
Buss said a sum of $6.14m would allow Mead to buy a $1.5m house in Perth within four years and deliver an annuity of $100,000 per year for the rest of her life, indexed against wage growth.
Mead’s original list of life expenses budgeted for a $2.5m house, a $250,000 diamond-encrusted bass guitar to match the crystal-encrusted piano, an annual shoe budget of $6,000 and life maintenance costs, including pilates classes, to the age of 96.
