Billionaire Michael Hintze adds Boorowa farm to rural knapsack
Expatriate Australian billionaire Michael Hintze has spent some small change buying out a Boorowa neighbour for $1,133,000.
It’s the latest NSW property acquisition to his rapidly expanding east coast farming portfolio. Hintze's wealth has been estimated by Forbes magazine at $US1.4 billion in early 20111. Rare with his public pronouncements, Hintze has said he was not just looking for capital gain from the properties. He says he seeks solid returns on production.
The London-based hedge fund founder has amassed one of Australia’s fastest-growing farm portfolios, with acquisitions totalling about 50,000 hectares since 2007.
His private pension fund, MHPF, has spent about $142 million on the land and water purchases.
His latest 327 hectare acquisition, set between Young and Goulburn, was settled last month.
Hintze is the founder and senior investment officer of CQS Management, a London-based hedge fund with assets of $US10.5 billion.
MHPF has been described as "a newly diversified agricultural force taking shape in eastern Australia" by The Land's agricultural writer, Peter Austin. It now has made 15 acquisitions in NSW and recently added two sugarcane farms in north Queensland, which marked a shift away from its weighting towards the southern NSW mixed farming of wool, prime lambs, cattle and winter cropping.
The purchases have been driven by the view that rural land in Australia now represents good value in light of the strong global demand for “soft commodities”. A key strategy of the group has been to aggregate parcels of land where possible to achieve efficiencies of scale and cross-property synergies.
Hintze's buying spree began when he spent $12.5 million for a Breadalbane property in July 2007. Trained as an engineer, Hintze served in the Australian army and started his firm, CQS, in 1999. It is short for "Convertible and Quantitative Strategies". He is a well-known philanthropist, with beneficiaries including the University of Sydney.
His name has been in the British headlines for the past two months given his links to Conservative Party funding.
