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For years, the rise of the Bundaberg farmer’s son turned London banker seemed unstoppable. Then things started to fall apart.
By
Rick Morton.
Lex Greensill.
Credit: Nine / Peter Braig
Lex Greensill started the week as a billionaire. Within days, the boy from Bundaberg had lost his empire.
The collapse of his fortune is, in part, explained by close links to Australia’s biggest renewables investor, Sanjeev Gupta. And as such, Greensill’s trouble may drag down Gupta’s global empire, with jitters already spreading to the 1200 workers at South Australia’s Whyalla steelworks, which was purchased by the Gupta Family Group (GFG) Alliance in 2017.
Lex Greensill, Sanjeev Gupta, whoâd have guessed!
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Quite easily the most remarkable part of Greensill Capitalâs collapse is that it took this long. For years
Lex Greensill was warmly lit by newspaper profiles depicting the boy from Bundaberg ingeniously subverting the gravity of supply chain finance. It somehow failed to register that Babylonian traders used invoice factoring before Hammurabi had even built the walls around them.
Besides its spurious exceptionalism, the most suspect element of Greensill Capital was its entwinement with
Sanjeev Guptaâs equally irregular empire. It always looked like Greensill was assuming an extraordinary level of risk as primary lender â in effect â to a roll-up of industrial junk assets.