Mystery Group Buying Land Near Air Force Base Now Suing Farmers–Congressman

A company with mysterious ownership is suing farmers in California in a bid to "force" them to give up their land around a U.S. Air Force base, a congressman has said, amid national security concerns around the purchase.

Speaking on NewsNation on Sunday, Democratic representative John Garamendi said that landowners around Travis Air Force Base, near Fairfield, did not want to sell up, but that Flannery Associates was making offers well over the market rate.

In the $510 million lawsuit lodged in May, the company—which has said it is almost entirely American-owned, but officials have reportedly been unable to confirm—claims that the landowners conspired to artificially inflate the price it paid for the real estate.

According to a report in The Wall Street Journal in early July, the U.S. Air Force's Foreign Investment Risk Review Office is probing the purchase of the 140 properties, but in eight months had yet to be able to determine who is behind the group.

Newsweek approached the U.S. Air Force via email for comment on Monday.

A map of the land parcels Flannery Associates owns across Solano County, drawn up by the newspaper based on property records, shows it now controls land from the Sacramento River to Fairfield, including land directly bordering three sides of the Air Force base.

In its complaint, lawyers for Flannery Associates said that the company had spent more than $800 million on the parcels. ABC7 reported that it had begun purchasing the land in 2018, but that the acquisitions ramped up this year.

'Landowners Took Advantage': Lawsuit

The lawsuit argues that the landowners "want—and have wanted—to sell their properties" and "saw an opportunity to conspire, collude, price fix, and illegally overcharge Flannery."

It cited one case in 2019, in which the company bought 2,500 acres of land for around $8,400 per acre, but claimed that many of the landowners had "recently" paid between $470 and $2,800 an acre. The lawsuit alleged that they collectively took advantage of a buyer willing to pay more than others for the properties and that Flannery had overpaid $170 million.

"It is a suit designed to force the farmers to lawyer up, spend tens of thousands of dollars on lawyering—and maybe at the end of the day, bankrupt themselves," Garamendi said on Sunday. "In fact, that has happened to at least one family that I know of, and I've heard rumors that another family simply said we can't afford the lawyers."

Records show that some of the defendants have since settled with the company out of court.

Newsweek approached lawyers acting on behalf of Flannery Associates via email for comment on Monday.

National Security Concerns

Garamendi said that the fact Flannery Associates had been able to purchase land on three sides of the Air Force base "raises immediate questions about national security," concerns which were compounded by the secrecy of the owners.

"Who are these people?" he told ABC7. "Where did they get the money where they could pay five to ten times the normal value that others would pay for this farmland?"

A legal representative for the firm told the Journal that its investors are 97 percent American, with the remaining three percent being of British or Irish background, but declined to go into further detail.

Chinese investment in U.S. land has become a cause for concern in recent years amid rising geopolitical tensions, despite it making up less than one percent of land under foreign ownership, official figures show.

National security fears were raised earlier this year over the purchase of a parcel of land 12 miles from the Grand Forks Air Force base in North Dakota by the Binzhou-headquartered Fufeng Group, where the company hoped to build a wet corn milling plant.

In a January 27 letter, Andrew Hunter, an assistant secretary of the Department of the Air Force, wrote that it viewed the project as "a significant threat to national security."

Garamendi told NewsNation that it was not known if China was behind the investments around Travis Air Force Base, "but we do know that the Chinese money was being used in North Dakota and we have a very deep suspicion, given the amount of money, given the lack of attention to values, that they simply want to acquire all of this land."

There have been several recent legislative efforts to limit Chinese ownership of U.S. soil. In May, Florida introduced a new law banning Chinese nationals from buying land within a five-mile radius of the state's military installations.