NOTHING TO SEE, NOTHING TO SEE...OR MAYBE THERE IS:  There are strange land deals going on around the United States.  You think we should take a look?  From Daily Mail: 

Government officials are investigating a mysterious company that has bought around 55,000 acres of dry farmland around a USAF base in California.

Travis Air Force base, northeast of San Francisco, houses large transport aircraft used for refueling smaller planes and sending aid and munitions around the world.

Starting in 2018, a company called Flannery Associates LLC has spent around $800million buying swathes of land around the base, leaving local, state and federal officials flummoxed as to who they are and what they want with it.

Government officials are investigating a mysterious company that has bought around 55,000 acres of dry farmland around a USAF base in California.

Travis Air Force base, northeast of San Francisco, houses large transport aircraft used for refueling smaller planes and sending aid and munitions around the world.

Starting in 2018, a company called Flannery Associates LLC has spent around $800-million buying swathes of land around the base, leaving local, state and federal officials flummoxed as to who they are and what they want with it.

In a letter to Solano County, the majority of which is owned by Flannery, the company is described itself as being 'owned by a group of families looking to diversify their portfolio from equities into real assets, including agricultural land in the western United States,' according to county newspaper the Daily Republic.

But after eight months of investigation, the Air Force's 'Foreign Investment Risk Review Office' has failed to identify any one individual behind the Flannery, according to the Journal.

Meanwhile, the US Agriculture Department has made its own inquiries, also to no avail.
'Nobody can figure out who they are,' Ronald Kott, mayor of nearby Rio Vista, which is now largely surrounded by Flannery land, told The Journal. 'Whatever they're doing - this looks like a very long-term play.'

Over the years that Flannery, registered in Delaware, has been buying up land, it has given a variety of accounts and indications as to what it wants to do with it.

An attorney for Flannery, Richard Melnyk, said in an email to the county in 2019 that it was considering working with local farmers to farm 'new types of crops or orchards,' according to The Journal.

Mitch Mashburn, who works for the county, cast doubt on the viability of using the land for agricultural purposes.

COMMENT:  There has long been a suspicion that this land, and other lands throughout the United States, are being bought by China, through front companies.  Owning land here would give the Chinese an enormous level of control over specific parts of the United States.

I think we'd better nail this down.  I really do.  I'd hate to see us in a confrontation with China, with China owning serious land around our military bases.

July 8, 2023