Currency trader Urs Schwarzenbach expands NSW farm holding
The big-spending, international polo-playing tycoon Urs Schwarzenbach has bought another NSW rural holding.
Schwarzenbach, rated the 83rd-richest person in Britain by the Sunday Times Rich List with a $740 million fortune, has spent $2.02 million to buy a further 400 hectares at Harden in the Southwest Slopes region of NSW.
This is his first purchase for four years, as Schwarzenbach last bought a nearby 1,062-hectare holding for $5.77 million in 2007.
Despite his slow pace of acquisition, Schwarzenbach has helped turn southern NSW into a billionaires' billabong since Romani Pastoral Company, directed by the 62-year-old Zurich-born businessman and his Sydney-born wife Francesca Schwarzenbach-Mulhall, commenced its rural consolidation in 1987.
Romani has spent more than $35 million in rural property, with the initial $21 million spent between 1987 and 1992.
It has about 50,000 hectares of NSW farmland, mostly between Harden and Jugiong, which includes showpiece polo-playing estate Garangula, and Redbank, the homestead briefly owned by impresario Robert Stigwood.
The couple maintain Redbank, the $5.1 million Jugiong property purchased in 1999, as the pastoral company's headquarters.
Redbank was held by the Osborne family for 145 years before being sold for $2.8million in 1981 to the Stigwood, who bought the property on Rupert Murdoch's recommendation while in Australia attending the premiere of the movie Gallipoli. It sold again in 1984, and again in 1988, for $4.69 million.
Redbank hosted England's Prince Harry as a jackaroo in 2003.
Romani’s priciest acquisition was elsewhere in NSW, the 13,700-hectare Windy Station on the Liverpool Plains, which cost $19 million in 1996 when bought from the Elders subsidiary the Australian Agricultural Company.
The couple have lived at Thames Side Court at Lower Shiplake, near Henley-on-Thames outside London, for about two decades. They also own nearby Culham Court, a red-brick 1770 Georgian residence on 260 hectares, which was bought through Knight Frank in 2006 for £32.9 million via a British Virgin Islands-registered company.
They also have a retreat in Marrakesh, the 19th-century Morocco palace Palais Layadi, which was built by Caid Layadi, a Northern African tribal lord.
In early 2011 the Schwarzenbachs bought an $11 million property along the Balmoral cliff top overlooking Middle Harbour in Sydney. They bought the property from the Watson family through Raine & Horne agent Brendan Warner, and it adjoins the Schwarzenbachs' long-standing Australian base, which cost $3.9 million in 1988.
It takes their Burran Avenue residential compound in Mosman to 2300 square metres.
It was Schwarzenbach who called the intensive-care ambulance that saved Kerry Packer from his heart attack while playing polo in 1990.
The son of a print shop owner, Schwarzenbach made his fortune from foreign exchange trading after founding his own company, Intex Exchange.