Lex Greensill’s Dreams of a $7 Billion Empire Unraveled in Days
The supply-chain financier with a fleet of planes has seen his business collapse into insolvency.
It took Lex Greensill two decades to ascend from the red dirt of his family’s sugar cane and melon farm in Australia to heading his own finance firm and traveling the world on a fleet of private jets. His fall back to Earth took just a week.
On March 8, his company, Greensill Capital, which boasted billions of dollars in backing from investors such as SoftBank Group Corp. and General Atlantic, collapsed into insolvency. In October, Greensill predicted he would soon sell a small stake of the company for hundreds of millions of dollars, implying a valuation of roughly $7 billion. Finance house Athene Holding Ltd., picking through what’s left of the company, found little of interest beyond computer systems and some intellectual property, which it offered to buy for only $60 million—though that deal now appears questionable. “There were red flags everywhere,” says Stephen Clapham, a forensic accountant who’s examined some of Greensill’s packaged loans. “If I were a professional investor, it would literally take me five minutes to decide that this was uninvestable.”