The fallen Australian billionaire tried to buy 200 hectares of farmland near his village so the view from his home isn’t spoiled. Now the town is tearing itself apart over the plan.
| Lex Greensill, the former Bundaberg farmer turned fallen billionaire financier, has a new project: a sustainable farming and reforestation project on 502-acre Shotwick Park, near the north-west English village of Saughall that has been his home base for two decades.
And by evening, I was sat in the back row of a parish council meeting that had descended into chaos. The chairman was ousted in a coup orchestrated by his deputy. Several councillors walked out in high dudgeon. Greensill’s initial interest was in the clutch of fields across a laneway from his house: he wanted to buy them to secure the view across to the mountains.
Even seemingly innocuous details, such as Greensill’s pre-emptive planning applications for a car park and an accessible footpath, came to be regarded with suspicion as potential Trojan horses for a housing scheme.“I live here. If I wanted to build houses on it, I don’t think I’d be living right next to it,” he says.
Late last year, the parish council demanded that the sale contract include a covenant which would prevent the land from being developed. The activist villagers worried that Greensill was trying to get away with a light-touch covenant. The CWAC position seems to be that the covenant should not be so onerous as to potentially affect the sale price or impose extra costs on the council.
The chairman told the meeting on Monday that it was improper for he and Greensill to hold private meetings, and he had called the police “simply to draw a boundary” around their interactions.On the face of it, the warring sides agree with each other. The councillors who ousted the chairman said they actually supported the December 29 motion suspending the sale until there was a covenant.
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