Australia’s biggest private family company, Linfox, owned by transport magnate Mr Fox, wants to stop the sale of the Kidman farms to PengXin.
Lindsay Fox in bid for Kidman cattle empire
Ben Wilmot
Commercial property reporter
Sydney
Billionaire trucker Lindsay Fox is making a late bid to keep Australia’s largest outback cattle empire in local hands with a push to buy the sprawling S. Kidman & Co stations that are set to fall into Chinese hands.
Mr Fox, worth more than $2 billion and one of Australia’s largest employers, has written to Treasurer Scott Morrison flagging his interest in buying the properties, that are close to being sold in a $300 million deal giving control of the century-old S. Kidman & Co empire to Chinese-owned Shanghai Pengxin Group Co.
Mr Morrison is within weeks of signing off on that deal after blocking an earlier bid last year on national security grounds.
But in a late counter-offer to the deal, Australia’s biggest private family company, Linfox, owned by transport magnate Mr Fox, has expressed its interest.
Linfox Property Group chief executive Andrew Fox told The Weekend Australian: “This asset is a great Australian asset, it’s fourth, fifth generation and it would be a great feeling, like (Agriculture Minister) Barnaby Joyce has said, to have it stay in Australian hands.”
The Kidman family put the pastoral empire on the blocks last year and attracted a slew of offshore interest, primarily from China, but now the Fox family is seeking to buy the business that is being sold through accounting firm Ernst & Young.
“Fox are very interested in the Kidman portfolio of properties; the only disadvantage is that we are late into the tender process,” Andrew Fox said.
“Until such time as FIRB (the Foreign Investment Review Board) have made a decision on where the direction of the sale to a foreign entity is concerned, Linfox cannot make a move to access any information and nor do we wish to jeopardise the position of the process that EY are in at the moment.”
Linfox’s letter to Mr Morrison said it could offer to buy the Kidman station portfolio in its entirety, including Anna Creek.
Anna Creek, the world’s biggest cattle station, partly straddles the Woomera missile-testing range in South Australia.
Woomera is the world’s largest weapons-test range and was recently used by British defence scientists to test BAE Systems PLC’s Taranis unmanned stealth drone.
Shanghai Pengxin’s revised offer excludes Anna Creek from the deal to remove security concerns.
The Linfox proposal also offers to speed completion of a counter-offer.
Mr Morrison in November blocked the Kidman sale to Shanghai Pengxin because it was against the national interest.
Mr Morrison said Australia’s foreign investment laws did not provide a role for the government to be “an active player in these commercial negotiations”.
“It is our job simply to apply those foreign investment laws to prospective foreign investment proposals to determine whether it is contrary to the national interest or not,” he said.
S. Kidman & Co Ltd controls pastoral leases sprawling over three states, producing grass-fed beef for export to Japan, the US and Southeast Asia.
