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'Mystery company' buys land worth $800M near Travis AFB, raising concerns

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Re: 'Mystery company' buys land worth $800M near Travis AFB, raising concerns

#21

Post by Negitivefrags »

ryandrake wrote: post #15

Setting aside the national security question, more broadly it's pretty insane that the USA lets companies hide who owns/controls them. When you decide to hang out your shingle and profit at the expense of the general public, I would say the general public has a genuine right to know who you are. Reminds me of how Disney used aliases and codenames and shell companies and secretive ownership structures to buy up all th…

I am also an advocate for transparency of ownership of companies, but that Disney example seems like more of a case against transparency than for it?

Why should Disney be price gouged in that circumstance?

Re: 'Mystery company' buys land worth $800M near Travis AFB, raising concerns

#22

Post by maxlamb »

jeffbee wrote: post #11

This is an incredibly silly story. Everything about this ownership is in public records. Flannery Assoc. has been openly buying land in this are for over 5 years and have spent over a billion dollars and sued dozens of parties. Everyone knows what they are doing. They want to lease the land for energy infrastructure.

why would then want to lease land for infrastructure right next to an air force base when there is lots of land further out?

Re: 'Mystery company' buys land worth $800M near Travis AFB, raising concerns

#23

Post by zmgsabst »

danpalmer wrote: post #3

Maybe a bit off topic, but my first thought was wondering whether the OSINT community would get any further with figuring out who it was, but I then realised, the OSINT community often look successful because they publish, but we don't know if "closed source" intelligence knows the same things or is even more successful, but just doesn't publish. Does anyone have any evidence one way or another? Are OSINT thinking ou…

Also, traditional intelligence services do a lot of OSINT (which is about source, not publishing).

“Open Source” in this context is about publicly available information — a source in the open.

Re: 'Mystery company' buys land worth $800M near Travis AFB, raising concerns

#24

Post by visviva »

jeffbee wrote: post #11

This is an incredibly silly story. Everything about this ownership is in public records. Flannery Assoc. has been openly buying land in this are for over 5 years and have spent over a billion dollars and sued dozens of parties. Everyone knows what they are doing. They want to lease the land for energy infrastructure.

Seems like your comment could really benefit from some links to supporting information, since the very existence of this article is proof that not everyone knows what the company is doing.

Re: 'Mystery company' buys land worth $800M near Travis AFB, raising concerns

#25

Post by detourdog »

ryandrake wrote: post #15

Setting aside the national security question, more broadly it's pretty insane that the USA lets companies hide who owns/controls them. When you decide to hang out your shingle and profit at the expense of the general public, I would say the general public has a genuine right to know who you are. Reminds me of how Disney used aliases and codenames and shell companies and secretive ownership structures to buy up all th…

My uncle was driving from Miami to Pennsylvania and saw the building activity. He thought it was more NASA building and put together a syndicate to buy as much land as possible. Disney bought his first plot and he turned around and bought the more as close as possible. He didn't need to know what was going.

The USA was founded on the use of capital and I'm always shocked how deep it runs including this anonymity.

found this article

https://archive.is/PmoL4

That article is more or less accurate but I have to add this story about him from a funeral late in life.

Standing around not knowing what to talk about he looked down at his tie. He started talking about how much the tie cost. This launched a story about the first time he had to buy an expensive tie when he was young to make an impression. He reflected on the luxury he currently enjoyed of not having to buy an expensive tie.

Re: 'Mystery company' buys land worth $800M near Travis AFB, raising concerns

#26

Post by perihelions »

Could this be a stealth real estate investment? It seems to be one of the regions of farmland closest-ish to the urban Bay Area. That would parsimoniously explain why the LLC is paying multiples over market value, on what's currently zoned as mere agricultural land.

Three things the Bay Area has in plenty right right now: (0) people with too much money; (1) people looking to escape the Bay Area; (2) people spooked about macroeconomic conditions. The mystery LLC claims to be a "group of families... looking to diversify their portfolio from equities to real assets". Maybe that's simply what it is: a conspiracy of techies stashing their loot in real estate, with a very long-term horizon, betting on a Detroit-ization of the SFC area and a consequent real estate boom in the greater exurbs.

Why stealthy? To buy the land as cheap as possible. Maybe that's what those legal disputes are about: some landowners sussed out that the new buyers have a very high willingness-to-pay, and are trying aggressively to maximize their selling price.

Re: 'Mystery company' buys land worth $800M near Travis AFB, raising concerns

#27

Post by epistasis »

jeffbee wrote: post #11

This is an incredibly silly story. Everything about this ownership is in public records. Flannery Assoc. has been openly buying land in this are for over 5 years and have spent over a billion dollars and sued dozens of parties. Everyone knows what they are doing. They want to lease the land for energy infrastructure.

Agreed. Though I think that legal entities like this need to have far far more public documentation of beneficial ownership, traceable all the way back to real people, be they US citizens or not.

This goes doubly so for any sort of land ownership. Nobody should be able to hide ownership of US land via shell games.

Re: 'Mystery company' buys land worth $800M near Travis AFB, raising concerns

#28

Post by victorbstan »

Negitivefrags wrote: post #21
ryandrake wrote: post #15

Setting aside the national security question, more broadly it's pretty insane that the USA lets companies hide who owns/controls them. When you decide to hang out your shingle and profit at the expense of the general public, I would say the general public has a genuine right to know who you are. Reminds me of how Disney used aliases and codenames and shell companies and secretive ownership structures to buy up all th…

I am also an advocate for transparency of ownership of companies, but that Disney example seems like more of a case against transparency than for it? Why should Disney be price gouged in that circumstance?

Free market?

Re: 'Mystery company' buys land worth $800M near Travis AFB, raising concerns

#29

Post by costco »

https://opencorporates.com/companies/us_ca/201905210181 says a guy named Thomas Mather was a director. https://www.waterboards.ca.gov/centralvalley/board_decisions... is some government application by Flannery that also has his name on it. Looks like this was covered in 2019: https://www.thereporter.com/2019/07/05/large-rural-land-purc...

If Mather is not the true owner, it would take the government five seconds to figure out who actually owned it by just finding out who's paying their lawyers (Skadden!) in the current litigation they are involved in.

Re: 'Mystery company' buys land worth $800M near Travis AFB, raising concerns

#30

Post by Bud »

jeffbee wrote: post #11

This is an incredibly silly story. Everything about this ownership is in public records. Flannery Assoc. has been openly buying land in this are for over 5 years and have spent over a billion dollars and sued dozens of parties. Everyone knows what they are doing. They want to lease the land for energy infrastructure.

1. No, it's not silly.

2. No, the ownership is not in public records, as this story makes clear. Who precisely is behind this seems quite vague.

3. The fact this has been "openly" (whatever that means) happening for 5 years is irrelevant.

4. No, this is begging the question. "Everyone" clearly does not know, at all, what they (who is they?) are doing.

5. What kind of energy infrastructure, precisely?

6. What's the source of your intense desire to deflect on this topic?

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