'Mystery company' buys land worth $800M near Travis AFB, raising concerns
abc7news.com
abc7news.com
Reminds me of how Disney used aliases and codenames and shell companies and secretive ownership structures to buy up all the land for Disney World in Florida[1], so that sellers didn't know who was behind it. This should be illegal.
1: https://www.wesh.com/article/disney-world-beginnings/3780786...
https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2021/02/04/the-end-of-the-an...
Why should Disney be price gouged in that circumstance?
No one would call selling a rare misprint 1978 US Quarter to a collector for $45,000 instead of 25 cents price gouging. (Maybe you would, I don't know what the going rate is. But this is literally an eBay auction price from a google search just now, so let's just say that it's not an exorbitant price.)
Since when? Buying and selling anything is always a game of imperfect information.
There’s nothing special about the buyer being a large corporation or the item being land.
Nope. And arbitrary or subjective standards like that are impossible to enforce anyway.
> or do you want people to play games and try to hide info to raise prices on people?
The example cited is the reverse with the price being lower than would be demanded if the seller knew the buyer had fat pockets.
In either case, caveat emptor[1] (or in this case, caveat venditor).
If the land trades for any value between X and Y, you are both made better off by the trade.
There is nothing wrong with you trying to capture as much of Y-X as you can, similarly there is nothing wrong with Disney trying to capture as much as they can. Neither of you are "owed" the money and there is no such thing as an objectively "fair" price.
The word "no" is a complete answer to a request for more information.
There would be no such thing as fraud if “accepted transaction == definitionally fair.”
There's a difference between false information and no information.
Fair prices when a buyer and seller agreed to as long as no one's lying. The fair price has nothing to do with how much money the buyer or seller make more lose.
And... yep.
I think consent and honesty make something Fair. Nobody has refuted this and The only other counter argument I've seen is that full disclosure would mean the seller gets more money. What is getting more money have to do with fair.?
[EDIT] I retract the "circular" claim—you're right that it's not that, it's the definitions of "lying" and "honest" that are making the difference.
When I buy a 20 cent bolt for my car, I don't tell them that it's worth $20,000 to me because my car won't run without it
Q: Who is buying this land?
A: XYZ Shell Corp (no connection to who is actually effectively buying and coming into control of this land)?
Obviously your argument will be "it's not false that XYZ Shell Corp is buying it," and sure, but it's obviously misleading in a way that affects the transaction, as it is specifically designed to do.
On the other hand, if the buyer is called XYZ Fun Center and tells you that they're going to put in a nonprofit for Orphans, that would be deception.
It all comes back to the idea that saying I won't tell you what I'm going to do with the purchase is not a lie. It's perfectly honest
I think the argument is really over whether parties on either side are entitled to privacy/anonymity. The answer seems to be 'yes' in the form of typically legal shell corps, anonymous LLCs, and the like.
I don't think the idea that benefiting one party's negotiation is such a compelling interest. In the case of Disney, it sounds good because it benefits the perceived Underdog, but It can just as easily cut the other way, especially if you extended to how bad you want something as some people in the thread advocate.
Maybe you want to buy a specific house cuz it's next to the Medical Center where you get treatment. That would probably influence how much you're willing to pay.
From an efficiency standpoint it is also preferable for the developer to capture the value, as naturally that increases incentives for development.
Isn't that true of any price increase due to increased demand? It seems like you're saying a seller shouldn't be allowed to raise their prices as demand increases, because they'd simply be benefiting from a positive externality created by the buyer.
For a market to function properly, information pertinent to traded value has to flow freely. The more you stifle that, the more rigged the market. Essentially, you sustain a monopoly that way.
Of course, people in possession of such "insider information" believe themselves in the right to profit from it. But that perspective is obviously biased and reveals a fundamental conflict between public good and private ownership. From the public perspective, the market works best when monopolies are dissolved quickly.
If it were, shell games would be great as well? One like the other is simply fraud. You exploit others' lack of insight.
Doing so is unethical due to the implications it would have on a societal level if it were condoned. In particular, you likely imagine yourself regularly ending up on the better end of the bargain. You are wildly mistaken.
If you don't want to participate in it you don't have to, but why should other suffer because of your moral hangups about other people making money?
There is no assumption that you can’t trade on knowledge unavailable to the rest of the market just not information that should be available to other shareholders but isn’t.
It’s not about a working market it’s about preventing you from stealing from other people.
Lots of economists think insider trading should be legal, precisely because it would make the market more transparent, not less.
If you sustain a profitable information imbalance, you prevent the market from reaching a more efficient state. You steal from everybody else that way. And incur opportunity costs that will dwarf any profits made. Not necessarily on a short-term personal level, certainly on a societal one in the long run.
People have surprising difficulties understanding, they are that society.
The world isn't black and white, and nearly zero things as complex as pros and cons of allowing insider trading can be reduced to naive boolean logic.
It is a fact for a long time a lot of economists, perhaps even a majority, are for insider trading because it provides signal to markets and pricing quicker than only allowing investors to discover problems on a quarterly clock-tick, which results in a lot more damage from asset floodgates instead of smoother transitions.
Ever read any published paper on the topic? Use Google scholar, you'll find useful knowledge there.
Because they have money and they're trying to buy out the whole market. This reads like a billionaire sobbing about not having access to a senior discount at the thrift store.
If your business strategy depends on deceiving people, what does that make you?
Heh. On swampland? The amount of money you need to do anything with it is just huge. They bought the land for exactly what others were willing to sell it for. Nothing more, nothing less. If they thought it was worth more, they would have held out for more.
You’re basically arguing for discrimination to be legal.
You confirmed that you’re dishonest by omission in your example. The fact that a counteroffer exists shows that it’s not implied you were forthwith with the price/value. Making/receiving a counteroffer implies that there was deceit, it’s just culturally acceptable deceit. If negotiations were completely honest, there would never be a counteroffer. Some Native American tribes were known for this sort of negotiation where the bottom line is stated and then accepted or rejected. They were often offended, by the implied dishonesty, by European’s counteroffers.
Extended to this situation, hiding an identity because it affects the business decisions of the other party is no different. (And I won’t continue the discussion if you want to defend your assertion that Disney is morally wrong here for being dishonest by omission.)
That being said, my views aren’t your problem. I’m asking for help understanding an alternative look on things and giving you the benefit of the doubt that you aren’t immature.
You’ve done nothing to back up your stance. By all means, feel free to provide a breakdown of your argument in the context of my point regarding deceit. I’m genuinely interested. The discrimination aspect of the discussion could use some research and, ultimately, is only a sideshow to the concept of dishonesty in business (and can be disregarded). As far as the logic of the “deceit” portion, there is a leap of faith in extending the deceit of basic haggling/negotiation to hiding one’s identity. As I said before, if we differ in this belief, there’s no reconciling. Otherwise, my logic is rock solid.
To clarify my point with anecdote: I recently negotiated the purchase of a car; at no point did I practice deceit. I simply stated the price I was looking for and then negotiated to lower the price by pitting sellers against each other. Regarding deceit, I’m referring to what is more along the lines of “haggling” — an attempt is made to get a better deal on a purchase/sale than the bottom line of what you are willing to offer. This haggling would be present in Disney’s purchase of the land where there are no other current buyers for the seller to pit against Disney.
I’m not 100% sure but I believe the model is what birthed HOA and Gated communities.
Permitting certain freedoms made swamp land more valuable.
If a company is going to great lengths to trick sellers into thinking it’s not being bought up for development, that’s deceit and a de facto admission you know the land is more valuable because of the comps you are engaging in
The USA was founded on the use of capital and I'm always shocked how deep it runs including this anonymity.
found this article
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.
I mean, it's not like they were going to expose their own nefarious dealings...
There's sadly been a move also in Europe to make it impossible for the public to learn who really owns a company[1]
Whoa whoa whoa, you can't just assume that profits come at the expense of the public! There are plenty of businesses that provide valuable goods and services for which I am happy to pay their profit margin, because the value they are providing to me is at least that amount. There are entire companies that spend their entire day coordinating shipments of food for me, including out-of-season fruit and fruits and vegetables unavailable in my location. There are companies that have invested in hideously expensive fabs and detailed technical knowledge to bring my inexpensive microchips that make my first computer look glacially slow. I happily pay Apple's profit margin because I get great hardware that looks elegant and has an operating system that is both Unix and doesn't require me to futz with it. The list goes on. This Marxist idea that companies are inherently exploitative is just incorrect and unhelpful. (That doesn't mean that everything is necessarily great, though, just that it does not take into account the other, very real side. It's not like a society built on companies = exploitative has ever worked in the real world.)
Why? If there are legitimate issues, you can always be dragged into court, or at least your business can be boycotted and suffer bad PR etc.
Being forced to put your home address just so every whacko with internet access can threaten your children, who had no choice in your business decisions, sounds like just a terrible idea.
Try making a false claim against yourself on r/RBI with dox and report back.
One of the major reasons for concealing who the real owner is of, well, anything is to conceal legitimate issues.
> or at least your business can be boycotted and suffer bad PR etc.
Not if you are concealing ownership to separate an act from the business entity that you would be concerned with retaliation against.
I'm saying the privacy measures are to protect against extralegal vigilante retaliation.
1. Anonymous LLCs and Trusts are how many people protect their privacy. Not just Disney, but regular people. The only things "insane" here are those who want to strip away that option.
2. If you break the law, your anonymity can and will be stripped. There are processes for this.
3. There is a zero percent chance that the NSA doesn't have access to these records, if "national security" is a concern.
Are there any other concerns, other than your stanch belief that your nose has an absolute God-given right to be in everyone else's business?
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.
Skadden has made use of in the past to hide their work for Putin affiliates. It's the reason that Skadden is the largest firm by revenue despite the lackluster quality of their work. (For an example of how bad Skadden is at the practice of law, see the clusterfuck that is the Twitter termination litigation.)
Here’s a semi-recent analysis of the situation.
https://www.hklaw.com/en/insights/publications/2020/05/fifth...
Probably because it is confidential and most people, and many attorneys, don’t understand that privilege and confidentiality are terms of art with distinct meanings.
From YKW, and squares with my very foggy recollection from PR.
—
Sure, I'll outline some key differences and similarities between privilege and confidentiality in the context of legal practice, specifically regarding client identification.
*Privilege*
1. Privilege is a legal concept that protects certain communications between an attorney and their client from being disclosed in legal proceedings.
2. It can be waived by the client, and there are certain exceptions to privilege, such as the crime-fraud exception.
3. However, the scope of privilege is generally limited to the content of communications themselves and doesn't typically extend to information about the client's identity, except in rare circumstances where the disclosure of the client's identity would reveal the substance of a confidential communication.
*Confidentiality*
1. Confidentiality, on the other hand, is a professional ethical obligation that requires lawyers to keep information related to the representation of a client secret, unless the client gives informed consent or the disclosure is impliedly authorized to carry out the representation.
2. This duty of confidentiality is broader than privilege and may cover information the lawyer learned from any source about the client, including the client's identity in many circumstances.
3. Unlike privilege, a breach of confidentiality can lead to professional sanctions for the lawyer, but it may not provide the same protections from disclosure in legal proceedings.
*Comparison and Contrast*
1. Both privilege and confidentiality are essential to ensure the free flow of information between a lawyer and their client, fostering trust in the lawyer-client relationship. They both serve to protect the client's interests.
2. However, privilege is a legal concept subject to legal exceptions and waivers, and it protects from forced disclosure in court, while confidentiality is a broader ethical duty that extends beyond the courtroom.
3. In most cases, the identity of a client isn't protected by privilege, but it may be covered by the duty of confidentiality depending on the context. If revealing the client's identity could harm the client or betray a confidence, then the lawyer has a duty to keep that information confidential.
This is a simplified summary and these concepts can get complicated in real-life situations. Always consider local and jurisdiction-specific rules and case law when dealing with privilege and confidentiality.
can you name a single officer of flannery assoc?
https://www.google.com/maps/@38.141376,-121.8339739,17582m/d...
Also "near Travis AFB" is being used to mean that Travis is in Solano County and most of this property is also in Solano County.
https://app.regrid.com/us/94585#b=none&o=FLANNERY+ASSOCIATES...
This goes doubly so for any sort of land ownership. Nobody should be able to hide ownership of US land via shell games.
A huge fraction of the people decrying new homes already own many parcels directly in their own name. And if the opponent is decrying "these apartments aren't affordable enough" you can be pretty sure to find a recent apartment ad renting a worse apartment at a higher price.
Which is funny, since using an LLC per parcel is probably a better strategy for the nasty landlord behavior.
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?
https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/california-landowne...
“various energy and power entities had contracts or proposals to operate on Flannery-owned land”
[1] https://www.pinalcentral.com/eloy_enterprise/commentary-tell...
A county where all the jobs are based on Coal mining better have a pretty good and realistic plan (and good leadership) if they want to try to move away from Coal after all. And those are expensive and hard to find, even if it’s possible.
Easier to ban other options and hope it works out. Not that it usually does, but it’s the natural reaction in many cases. Denial is a natural protective response.
> In the lawsuit, Flannery said land it has acquired is used for interstate commerce. The company said various energy and power entities had contracts or proposals to operate on Flannery-owned land in the region.
https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/california-landowne...
[1] No "correct by definition" memes, please. Imagine that you are writing code and thus have to be logical, exhaustively if you want to achieve correctness.
Oh, I understand: it is that Westerners believe that what is mandatory for us is optional for others.
> We want to have capabilities and exert a level of control and influence that Russia is not also able to exert.
Right: regional security for us, but not for you.
> When we try to prevent China from controlling popular media narratives, it's not a gotcha to say "ha, but the US does that, too."
Yes it is, because it illustrates hypocrisy, thus is a gotcha.
> Yes, that is the entire point. We're trying to win, not to play fair. Which is also what they're trying to do.
Right, but our politicians and media lie about what is going on, and lots of people believe them so now we have a mess on our hands.
But for the land around Travis Air Force Base... Just seize it. If you're going to buy land around a military base and obscure the owners, that's a fair action. 2-3 seizures like this and the land around military bases will be untouchable in the future.
You’re sad that the government would not allow your grandparents to continue living in an area which is designated for plane crashes?
I lived in VB for over 20 years, family in the military and such. I’m very interested in where your grandparents house was. The house my parents bought in the early 90s would have the windows sounds like they were shattering when jets would break the sound barrier over the neighborhood. The sound of jets was almost consistent. It was a wild time. Over the years the jet noise has become less and less with the ever sprawling suburb of Virginia Beach (I don’t claim it to be a city because it doesn’t really have city vibes, it’s just one big suburb with lots of neighborhoods). There’s no more breaking of the sound barrier on a what seemed like a daily basis. The pilots have calmed down their maneuvers and changed locations to further out in the ocean.
I too remember covering my ears every time a jet flew overhead when I was a kid. They were loud!!
I'm more sad the navy didn't destroy the home after purchasing it because it's fallen into disrepair and there's nothing really keeping squatters out. The house and surrounding farm was designated for plane crashes many years after they purchased it.
The real problem here is the lack of transparency in ownership of corporations in the United States. If corporations weren't allowed to buy--then keep--other corporations (instead of just absorbing all their assets) this wouldn't be a problem.
Rant: I don't think corporations should be allowed to sell brands that don't include the name of the corporation clearly marked on the packaging. Walmart's Equate products all say they're manufactured by and for Walmart right on the bottle/box/whatever. Every product should be like that. Any and all corporations that own a brand should be on the label. From the bottom all the way to the top. The whole child-parent tree should be present.
https://sfist.com/2013/10/11/mark_zuckerberg_buys_house_next...
Does anyone have any evidence one way or another? Are OSINT thinking outside the box and doing something materially different, or are they just visible? Are traditional intelligence communities still doing this but just being understandable secretive about methods?
This is not to down play the importance of the OSINT community in any way, I believe publishing does materially change things by increasing accountability to the public.
Off the top of my head is HI Sutton. He's good for submarines. Rob Lee RALee85 is pretty good as well. Then there's the Jeffrey Lewis (ArmsControlWonk). Pay attention who those people follow. They do this for a living, and have been for decades.
“Open Source” in this context is about publicly available information — a source in the open.
Thanks for the insight, I thought this would probably be the case.
Do you think traditional intelligence services have any blindspots that OSINT are managing to make headway? Even if overall the balance is far more in favour of traditional players?
I have a lawyer friend who confirmed this from their own experience. They told us about a sibling who is a high profile senior exec at well known public company. This person tried to hide their home purchase for privacy and safety reasons. They had the resources to do this, spent a ton of money, and ultimately failed. You can easily Google their address.
> This person tried to hide their home purchase for privacy and safety reasons. They had the resources to do this, spent a ton of money, and ultimately failed. You can easily Google their address.
I assume they made the mistake of actually living at that address. You're outed to Equifax and others the second you sign up for utilities as yourself. On paper, you can only remain anonymous if you don't live there...
...but the shadiest people I know use grandmothers' foreign maiden names to sign up for services at properties they obfuscate ownership of. Their "deadname" is kept very much alive after marriage and naturalization if you do this regularly. It amounts to synthetic identity fraud so I doubt any attorney would give this sort of direction.
" Nearly one in five homes were purchased by investors in early 2023, including LLCs and other corporate entities, according to data compiled by real-estate firm Redfin of more than 40 of the largest U.S. metro areas. "
https://www.billtrack50.com/blog/investment-firms-and-home-b...
The percentage of investors that buy single-family homes in a given year may rise or fall but the long-term trend is clear: Investors are owning more and more of the total market over time. Actual single families are being priced out.
Some markets are worse than the national statistic and entire neighborhoods are being bought in order to turn every single home into rentals. The New York Times wrote about this last year:
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/23/us/corporate-real-estate-...
It's a very real issue and a few simple changes to the laws in regards to how many single-family homes may be owned by corporations would make a huge impact.
I don't see that mentioned anywhere in the article.
I see "Last year, investor purchases accounted for 22% of American homes sold. This is significantly down from the 80% number in 2020-2021,"
Also, that "80%" number appears to be a mistake that doesn't match the cited source. https://www.redfin.com/news/investor-home-purchases-q3-2021/
It appears to me a misstatemenr of "investor purchasing of single-family homes increased over 80%." which is just silliness comparing the covid dip to the post-covid recovery back to normal.
The billtrack50 article is so incoherent and self-contradictory that it's not worth trying to make sense of it.
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.
Buy the land, build the train connections, develop the land, sell or rent the now hopefully prime real eatate.
- "“Nobody can figure out who they are,” said Ronald Kott, mayor of Rio Vista, Calif., which is now largely surrounded by Flannery-owned land."
(edit: for reference, this is what I see https://ibb.co/M2dDBZ1. The address is just a mail forwarding service.)
This land is all filling out a very good area for wind power generation, so I'm guessing they have plans for a lot of wind farms.
EDIT: If you go to https://globalwindatlas.info/en you'll have no trouble finding the area on a view of CA. It's one of the bright red areas between SAC and OAK and this land conveniently fills most of it.
If nothing else this should be an indicator of how broken the land & real estate purchase system is in the US. We are literally the only country in the world that has no controls and no visibility over having large chunks of our territory bought out by a foreign resident, foreign business or even a foreign government.
Also known as the modus operandi for Skadden Arps, the most morally bankrupt firm in the country. Skadden's "illustrious" client list includes Elmo (they advised him on the strategy of forcing terminated employees into arbitration and then refusing to pay arbitration fees), organized crime, and multiple individuals and entities known to be KGB affiliates and Putin allies (Skadden has paid hefty fines for illegal lobbying on behalf of the Putin regime...multiple times.)
> "No foreign person or group holds any significant interest or substantial control over Flannery, either now or at the time of any land purchase made by Flannery," the letter said.
"Person or group" doesn't include "government". This also doesn't mean the (supposedly domestic) owners won't lease the land to a foreign entity. Also, note the word "significant." And, "foreign" compared to what? If the owners are, say, Chinese, "no foreign" means no NON-Chinese.
Not trying to stoke paranoia, but just showing how statements like this are open to interpretation and should be taken with a grain of salt.
Hard to have sympathy for their dilemma
This isn't like someone is buying land beside Groom Lake or Skunkworks...
https://www.dailyrepublic.com/all-dr-news/solano-news/milita...
This unit pretty much represents the last remaining Navy presence in the Bay Area. Ironic, given the history of the Navy there, beginning with the establishment of the shipyard on Mare Island before the Civil War, and the first Navy radio station on the West Coast in 1904:
https://www.history.navy.mil/content/history/nhhc/our-collec...
https://www.scramble.nl/military-news/breaking-c-130-tacamo-...
What if somebody moves a few bulldozers to that land and start raising an obstacle which would be convenient to protect AFB from spying? I highly suspect somebody will show up and demand this to stop. That guy should be questioned - who he is and on what grounds he's managing the property. This will likely lead towards the owners.
Can the beneficiaries be contacted this way, if other ways fail for months?
Actually, I think the registrar of the property could be able to issue a request for documentation leading to the owners or beneficiaries. It's either a physical person - could be talked with - or an organization - which is registered somewhere, and can be similarly contacted.