Mystery Erupts as Unknown Buyers Snatch Up $1 Billion Worth of Land Near US Air Force Base
An attorney for an investment group has denied that the group is controlled by foreign investors as government investigators seek the identities of the purchasers of nearly $1 billion in real estate near California’s Travis Air Force Base.
Flannery Associates’ purchases have made it the largest single landowner, with roughly 52,000 acres, in Solano County, where the base is located, according to The Wall Street Journal.
The U.K.’s Daily Mail, which put the figure at 55,000 acres, said the company had “given a variety of accounts and indications as to what it wants to do with it, including leasing the land to olive growers or developing “new types of crops or orchards” with local farmers.
The company has been making those statements since at least 2019, however, and has yet to make any concrete moves to put the land to any use.
The attorney, who was unnamed in the report, told the Journal that Flannery is controlled by U.S. citizens, with only 3 percent of its capital coming from overseas, specifically Britain and Ireland.
“Any speculation that Flannery’s purchases are motivated by the proximity to Travis Air Force Base” had no basis in fact, according to the attorney.
The Journal cited several people with knowledge of the investigation by the Air Force’s Foreign Investment Risk Review Office. One of those told the outlet that after eight months of looking, the office was still unable to name the investors involved.
Two House Democrats whose districts include the Solano County land purchased by Flannery, have requested a federal investigation into the matter, the Journal reported.
“We don’t know who Flannery is, and their extensive purchases do not make sense to anybody in the area,” said Rep. John Garamendi, the senior Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee’s readiness panel.
“The fact that they’re buying land purposefully right up to the fence at Travis raises significant questions,” he added, apparently either disbelieving the group’s lawyer or ignorant of his denial of that claim.
Rep. Mike Thompson joined Garamendi in the request for an investigation by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S., known as Cifus inside the beltway, apparently out of lack of faith in the ability of the Air Force to conduct the investigation on it’s own.
The Journal described Cifus as “a multiagency panel that can advise the president to block or unwind foreign acquisitions for security concerns.”
A number of prominent Twitter users were also apparently skeptical of claims of U.S. control of the investment company, and the group’s attorney has reportedly declined to provide any additional information about them.
I’ll bet I know who they are…
Investors spent nearly $1 billion buying land near an Air Force base in California. Officials are investigating who exactly they are. https://t.co/xnlNymjCoq
— Mark Simon (@MarkSimonHK) July 7, 2023
Who is secretly buying all the land near California Air Force. China. China. China. https://t.co/O7Tk8HGH2u
— Citizen Free Press (@CitizenFreePres) July 7, 2023
Just guessing.
Maybe Biden’s communist Chinese masters?https://t.co/VeehjR3hqX— Mark R. Levin (@marklevinshow) July 8, 2023
Cifus has the authority to subpoena Flannery Associates for additional information about its investors, but people the Journal asked about it could not recall a time that it had ever actually used that authority.
Solano County Administrator Bill Emlen said local officials had been trying to identity the people behind Flannery for years.
County Supervisor Mitch Mashburn told the Journal that the company had not engaged with local officials at all, which it would have been expected to do if the investors planned to develop the property.
“The majority of the land they’re purchasing is dry farmland,” Mashburn said. “I don’t see where that land can turn a profit to make it worth almost a billion dollars in investment.”
“Nobody can figure out who they are,” said Rio Vista, California, Mayor Ronald Kott, whose town is now “largely surrounded” by land owned by the investment group.
“Whatever they’re doing — this looks like a very long-term play.”
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