John Kahlbetzer, from oil rigs to the Rich List, dies
Businessman John Kahlbetzer retained his competitive spirit and was still fit enough to play tennis just months before his death at the age of 92, according to his family.
John Kahlbetzer died in Sydney on October 27, a little over a year after selling out of agriculture in Argentina and returning to Australia, where he made his name in farming after earlier ventures selling tyres, in steel trading and as a corporate raider.
John Kahlbetzer snr playing at family Polo grounds at Jemalong in 1993.
German-born Kahlbetzer worked on oil rigs after arriving in Australia in his early 20s before his entrepreneurial flair helped build a vast family fortune. The family was worth $1.42 billion on the 2023 Financial Review Rich List.
The Rich List family made much of its billion dollar-plus fortune in farming but has since diversified into venture capital and other investments under Mr Kahlbetzer’s sons, Johnny and Markus.
The brothers said he would be remembered for his “business success and sharpness” and, at times, his “ruthlessness”.
“But also for your compassion and caring for individuals,” they said in a joint obituary published on Monday.
Businessman John Kahlbetzer pictured in The Australian Financial Review in November 1961.
“Your love of sports, art, food, beer, wine and your competitiveness was legendary.”
The family’s Twynam Agriculture Group was once one of Australia’s biggest owners and operators of broad-acre farmland, producing grains, oilseed, cattle, wool, cotton, rice and citrus.
The group also held extensive water rights, but started selling off those assets in the 2000s.
The family walked away from farming in Argentina, where it had operated for 40 years, in 2022 after becoming fed up with economic uncertainty and runaway inflation in the South American nation.
Mr Kahlbetzer spent considerable time in Buenos Aires, where he founded LIAG Argentina in 1982, later in life despite the country’s prolonged economic crisis.
LIAG Argentina was sold to the family of Gerardo Bartolome, the founder of global soybean powerhouse GDM Seeds, for $US201 million last year in what was the largest agricultural transaction in Argentina’s history.
John Kahlbetzer (right) leaving the Supreme Court in 1991.
Johnny and Markus described how their father was once kidnapped in Australia, thrown in the back of his Porsche and driven around for a few hours. He was released after duping his captors by handing over unsigned traveller’s cheques.
Mr Kahlbetzer forged a reputation as a corporate raider in the 1970s and early 1980s when he regularly featured in the pages of The Australian Financial Review.
The agriculture business grew from a hobby farm called Razorback to the point where Twynam owned more than 440,000 hectares of NSW and was Australia’s biggest irrigator with about 260,000 megalitres of river water and 38,000 megalitres of bore water entitlements.
The sell-down of the family’s vast network of Australian farms was sparked by the Millennium drought and also led to a controversial $303 million deal whereby the Kahlbetzers sold water rights under a $3.1 billion Rudd government buyback scheme.
A previous version of this article incorrectly identified the kidnapping happening in Argentina; it was in Australia.
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