Our biweekly look at the world of billionaires has deals – financial, political and hostile – that have the potential to redraw fortunes and economic landscapes, from Australia to China, and even determine next month’s US election.
Gina Rinehart
The richest person in Australia is teaming up with a Shanghai property outfit to buy the outback’s most famous cattle company in a deal valued at about A$365 million (Dh1.03 billion).
The deal, in which Gina Rinehart’s Hancock Prospecting and Shanghai CRED Real Estate Stock will buy S Kidman and Co, requires approval from Chinese regulators and Australia’s Foreign Investment Review Board, which last year blocked the sale of Kidman to an overseas buyer on grounds of national security.
Founded in 1899 by the so-called cattle king Sidney Kidman, the company’s ranches span 101,000 square kilometres, or about 1.3 per cent of Australia’s total land area, and carry about 185,000 cattle. The family-owned enterprise produces grass-fed beef for export to Japan, the US and South East Asia.
The review board in November last year blocked the sale of Kidman to an overseas buyer, saying the proximity of its Anna Creek ranch to a weapons-testing range could compromise national security. Kidman subsequently carved that ranch from the sale.
Shanghai CRED was part of a Chinese group that earlier this year dropped its bid for Kidman after opposition from the Australian government weeks before a general election. Chinese investment in Australian agriculture is often publicly opposed, although foreign capital helps the industry to tap export demand.
And yesterday, news emerged that four of Australia’s wealthiest outback cattle families plan to lodge an entirely domestic offer for Kidman at a price that they say will exceed the amount offered by the Rinehart group.
Ms Rinehart spent her first few years in the western Australian outback. She went to university briefly but quit so that she could join her father’s iron-ore empire. When he died in 1992, she took over.
Bloomberg values Ms Rinehart’s wealth at US$12.3bn. That puts her well ahead of the second-richest Australian, the high-rise apartment developer Harry Triguboff, who is at $7.3bn.
Shaw-Lan Wang
A Taiwanese billionaire was robbed at her Paris home of jewels worth up to €200,000 (Dh805,584), police said last week.
Shaw-Lan Wang, 75, a publisher who is also the main shareholder of the French fashion label Lanvin, lives in the chic 16th district of the French capital.
The journalism school graduate was napping when the robbery happened on the afternoon of October 4, the police said. It was a day after the celebrity Kim Kardashian lost millions of dollars worth of jewels in a heist in a nearby arrondissement. The two robberies did not appear to be linked.
Two men broke into Ms Wang’s flat while she was sleeping and made off with jewels including a ring she was wearing, a police source said. They also stole telephones and “various luxury items”, he said.
The value of the haul was between €150,000 and €200,000.
Forbes estimates the Wang family’s worth at $1bn.
Koch brothers
With control of the US senate in the balance, the billionaires are deploying their own political armies to swing states across the country and supplying them with everything from cutting-edge voter data to salty snacks. Unaffiliated with any candidate or party, these ground troops are staging protests, manning phone banks and knocking on doors.
In Nevada, where a senate seat is up for grabs as the Democrat Harry Reid is retiring, the billionaire Koch brothers, Charles and David, are the biggest spenders so far.
While most spending from these groups flows to television ads, some donors have shifted resources this year towards the more labour-intensive work of talking with voters face to face. In Nevada, the street brawl is getting unusually personal.
Charles and David, who oversee a national network of conservative groups, have long feuded with Senator Reid. They’re now waging a proxy war over his replacement, turning the race into a big-money free-for-all.
Outside groups have spent $45.8m on the Nevada senate race so far, compared with only $7.1m by the candidates themselves, Democrat Catherine Cortez Masto and Republican Joe Heck, according to the Centre for Responsive Politics (CRP).
That is the biggest spending imbalance of any of the 10 most expensive senate races in the country, the data shows. One super-pac (political action committee) funded by the Koch brothers’ organisation, Freedom Partners Action Fund, has spent about $7.1m on advertising in the Nevada senate race, according to the CRP. That doesn’t account for the cost of the ground forces they’ve mustered.
The Koch network aims to spend more than $200m across the country on political activity between last year and this year, making it a force to rival the major parties. The Kochs generally side with Republicans but decided this year not to back Republican candidate Donald Trump. That leaves the senate as their priority.
Donald Trump
The New York billionaire has been having a tough time in his pursuit of the US presidency. While few would have predicted a year ago that he would get this far, polls indicate that he is lagging behind the Democrat candidate, Hillary Clinton, in the weeks before voting, on November 8.
To his critics, his campaign is verging on parody – and now the candidate has made parody itself one of his targets.
Mr Trump at the weekend took to Twitter to assail the Saturday Night Live sketch show for its depiction of his performance in the October 9 debate with Mrs Clinton. He called the skit a “hit job”, said that after 42 seasons it was “time to retire the boring and unfunny show”, and opined that actor Alec Baldwin’s portrayal of him “stinks”.
Mr Trump hosted an episode of the show in November.
The polling-analysis website FiveThirtyEight gives Mr Trump a 12.6 per cent chance of winning the White House.
Forbes estimated late last month that his net worth had fallen by about $800m in the past year to stand at $3.7bn. It attributed the decline to softer property prices in New York. For example, Forbes estimated that the billionaire’s signature Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue was worth $471m, down by $159m from a year ago.
Wang Jianlin
The chairman of Dalian Wanda, Wang Jianlin, the billionaire who has been on a buying spree in Hollywood, urged US filmmakers on Monday to increase collaboration with China as he unveiled a subsidy to lure productions to his new multi-billion-dollar studio. Mr Wanda and the local government will give a 40 per cent rebate of certain costs to qualifying producers who film at the studio in Qingdao, China, the company announced at a red-carpet event in Los Angeles. The incentive, which will be paid from a five-year, $750m fund, was outlined in a video narrated by American movie star Matt Damon.
Yao Zhenhua
A low-profile tycoon has rocketed up the ranks of China’s wealthy after a hostile takeover he launched for the country’s biggest property developer helped swell his fortunes.
Yao Zhenhua’s wealth surged ninefold to $17.2bn, making him China’s fourth-richest person in the Hurun Report’s annual ranking, which was released on October 10. Last year, he was estimated to be worth just under $2bn, putting him at No. 231.
There was little change at the top of Hurun’s list .
Mr Wang held on to top spot, with Hurun putting his wealth at $32.1bn.
Jack Ma, the founder and chairman of Alibaba, stayed in second place even as his wealth swelled by 41 per cent to $30.6bn thanks to the e-commerce giant’s rising share price this year. Ma Huateng of Tencent, which runs the WeChat social-media service, moved up one spot to third with a fortune estimated at $24.6bn.
The Hurun chairman Rupert Hoogewerf said Mr Yao’s rise illustrated shifts in China’s maturing economy.
“The first money made in China 20 years ago came from trading, followed by manufacturing, real estate, IT and today it is about using the capital markets for financial investments,” Mr Hoogewerf said.
Mr Yao, 46, is the chairman of Baoneng Group, a property and financial services group based in the southern boomtown of Shenzhen. His privately owned company has made waves over the past year by amassing 25 per cent of China Vanke’s shares, leading to a bitter and prolonged takeover battle for the homebuilder, which is based in the same city. Mr Yao’s wealth soared as speculation about Baoneng’s bid sent Vanke’s mainland-listed shares surging.
Eduardo Costantini
Argentina has just created another billionaire. He isn’t sure it will last.
Eduardo Costantini, the majority shareholder of Consultatio, has a net worth of $1bn according to Bloomberg, after shares of the nation’s biggest publicly traded property company more than doubled in the past year.
“It’s not nice to be named as a billionaire,” said Mr Costantini, 70, over cups of espresso at his office in the Latin American Art Museum of Buenos Aires, or Malba, which he founded in 2001. “What if your stock is down 50 per cent and you are no longer a billionaire?” Mr Costantini has benefited as the Merval index has jumped by 59 per cent in 12 months, with investors embracing the finance-friendly policies of the president, Mauricio Macri.
Mr Costantini said the gains may be fleeting. Argentina is in a recession. He points to neighbouring Brazil, where prominent fortunes have declined as Latin America’s largest economy struggles to move past a political crisis that resulted in the impeachment of the president, Dilma Rousseff.
Mr Costantini, whose passions include kitesurfing as well as collecting art, scored his first big deal when he used profits from stock market trading in the 1970s to buy a plot of land and quadrupled his money in a few months.
He then set up the brokerage firm Consultatio in 1980 and scored millions more by cashing out on an investment in publicly traded Banco Frances. After selling out of the lender, he began making property investments, building several Buenos Aires towers and Nordelta, a gated community north of the city that houses 30,000 people.
He also has a 45 per cent stake in the holding company for Consultatio's US projects, including Oceana Bal Harbour, a $1.3bn luxury mega resort in Miami that is nearing completion. In Uruguay, he built a controversial circular bridge designed by the architect Rafael Vinoly to bring a development boom to his corner of the beach near the chic resort town of Punta del Este.
* Agencies and The National
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