Billionaire Gina Rinehart is quite likely to take ownership of S. Kidman and Company’s historic 10.1 million hectare outback beef business by Christmas - but don’t bank on it.
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Other hopeful bidders continue lingering on the radar, despite several recent contenders conceding they cannot match the latest offer in the contentious sale saga.
Last week Mrs Rinehart’s Hancock Prospecting partnership with persistent Chinese investor, Shanghai CRED, locked in a binding bid implementation agreement with Kidman to pay its shareholders $365 million for the pastoral empire.
The deal depends on the Hancock-Shanghai partnership Australian Outback Beef (AOB) on-selling Anna Creek Station – about 25% of the Kidman estate.
Contracts for the sale of the 2.4m hectare Anna Creek and its adjoining outstation, “The Peake”, are apparently already lined up with at least one potential, undisclosed, buyer.
In April the Coober Pedy-based Williams Cattle Company was poised to buy Anna Creek – the world’s biggest cattle station – prior to Kidman sale plans for the rest of the business to a Chinese-Australian consortium being blocked by Canberra and both deals collapsing.
If regulatory approvals from the Foreign Investment Review Board (FIRB) and state governments now continue relatively smoothly the 18-month sale process could finally be wrapped up by December.
The Chinese government must also agree to the movement of private company cash from China will go to an appropriate offshore investment.
Kidman and Co chief executive officer, Greg Campbell, said the process was still subject to numerous approval stages and possible developments.
“It may be finalised in a couple of months - not five or six,” he said.
It may be finalised in a couple of months
- Greg Campbell
However, another all-Australian agribusiness syndicate involving several prominent farming families is set to up the ante with a counter bid of $375m.
The Brinkworth, Buntine, Oldfield and Harris families’ various livestock and cropping interests currently span vast areas of the Top End, South Australia, Central Australia, and NSW.
Their syndicate, formed in June and has been working towards making an unconditional bid for Kidman’s 16 stations in SA, WA, Northern Territory and Queensland, and a feedlot, and its 180,000 head beef herd.