In the years following the Second World War, thousands of Australians took to the land and began a new life in farming. One of these was Roy Greensill, who planted and harvested sugar cane, watermelons and peanuts on a small plot outside Qunaba, Queensland. The township lies a few miles to the east of the nearest large urban centre, Bundaberg. It was named for the only local landmark, the Qunaba Mill, which was previously known as the Mon Repos Mill until it was taken over, in 1900, by the Queensland National Bank. Qunaba is a kind of portmanteau of the bank’s own name.
Farming was tough. This part of Queensland is subtropical and prone to extreme weather conditions. It was remote, especially back then – Bundaberg itself is about 230 miles from the state capital, Brisbane. The township, which is named after the Bunda kinship group of the local indigenous Taribelang people, was entirely flooded in the 1960s, an event that caused widespread economic pain and lived long in the memories of the region’s farmers.
Success in Bundaberg demanded sheer hard work and bloody-mindedness – a resolute refusal to accept that ongoing hardship or the occasional outright calamity would finish you off. It required relentless optimism even in the face of a terrible storm or catastrophic harvest. It was the sort of place where you had to ignore the dire reality of your circumstances from time to time, because if you acknowledged just how bad things were, you’d be finished.
Despite everything, it was possible to dig out a decent living. From Roy Greensill’s original sixty-six acres of sugar cane, the farm tripled in size within twenty years. By the time Roy’s grandson, Alexander ‘Lex’ David Greensill, was born on 29 December 1976, the family owned hundreds of acres of farmland. Bundaberg itself had grown too. The population was still just about thirty thousand, but they were increasingly wired into the Queensland and Australian economy.
Still, when Lex and his two brothers were growing up, the family often struggled for money. The farm did all right, but they sometimes had to wait months for the supermarkets that bought their produce to pay up. Young Lex thought it was grossly unfair the way big business could use its massive buying power to bully farmers into accepting payment on their terms.
Years later, Lex’s apocryphal backstory always started this way when he retold it time and time again. The point of the retelling was always clear: the financial system is rigged against the little guy, and fixing it was a mission. It was certainly a convenient and compelling creation myth.
In fact, the Greensill farm had mostly run well enough under the stewardship of Lex’s parents, Judy and Lloyd. At school, Lex was smart and studious. He was small and not especially athletic – as an adult, he became an avid long-distance runner and cycled too, and he tried his hand at golf, squash, surfing and water-skiing. But not being on the sports teams was a knock against him in the sports-oriented environment. Combined with his bookishness, this meant he was the occasional target of jockish bullies.
But he was hard-working, becoming school captain and a leading member of the school debating team. In the tough farming landscape of Bundaberg, Lex was learning there was another way to rise to the top. If he couldn’t rely on brawn, then he could certainly win with his brains, his words, his perseverance, his sheer, indefatigable willpower. To make it big, he’d have to work incredibly hard and project remarkable self-confidence.
In Lex’s later retelling, his parents couldn’t afford to send him to college, so he studied for a law degree by correspondence. I could never substantiate this claim that attending university in person was out of his financial reach. There are plenty of people who are not very well off and still attend university, and the Greensills weren’t so poor. Certainly, however, the story embellished his credentials as extremely hard-working and driven and supported his ‘helping-out-the-little-guy’ mission statements.
Either way, Lex worked as a clerk for a local law firm and earned his degree from the Queensland University of Technology by listening to cassette tapes mailed to the farm. ‘I can tell you that is a tough way to earn your degree,’ he told me later. ‘Work full-time, discover girls, and do a law degree all at the same time.’
He also worked voluntarily with an industry group for farmers where he tried to get a better deal out of the supermarkets and wholesale fruit and vegetable buyers. He’d work on the terms in their sales contracts, including how and when they were paid. He claimed that his pro bono work for the farmers’ association had a far-reaching impact. ‘Basically, the little guys get screwed by the big guys,’ he told me. ‘The market in Australia has completely reformed, in no small part, because basically from the point I started my legal career I spent a chunk of my time working gratis on that to help farmers get a better deal.’
BY 1999, LEX had completed his legal studies and articles at Payne Butler Lang, a prominent Bundaberg law firm. He briefly spent some time at Deacons Graham & James, another law firm, with connections across Asia and a focus on intellectual property and new technologies.
He’d also expanded his CV, collecting a list of impressive accolades: world champion of the 1998 Junior Chamber International Public Speaking Competition; finalist in the 1999 Young Australian of the Year Awards (he was beaten by Bryan Gaensler, an astronomer and expert in magnetic fields and supernova remnants); two-term appointee to the Asia Pacific Development Council on bilateral trade and education ties; 1998 Young Citizen of the Year for Shire of Burnett in Queensland. He could speak a little Japanese and he’d become a Justice of the Peace. He was the director of five separate companies, including Greensill Corporation Pty.
Lex was, he said, skilled in law, wireless applications, international trade, insurance, capital raising, sales and marketing, public speaking, written communications, corporate governance, training, organization and management, the etiquette of shareholder and board meetings, and in navigating Asian markets. He’d worked with teams in Australia, New Zealand, Japan, China, Hong Kong, Macau, Thailand, Pakistan, Philippines and Austria.
He said he was ‘tenacious, disciplined and committed . . . my personal drive, fiercely competitive nature, and the ability to perform under pressure for extended periods make me an ideal business associate.’
The CV ran to ten pages in total. For a twenty-four-year-old embarking on his first career steps, the résumé was filled with bold claims and exactly the kind of eye-catching statements that carried Lex through the next two decades. It was also over the top, brash, boastful, and rather less impressive if you parsed the details. You could poke fun at it. But you had to admire the audacity. In my view, the document was in many ways a very fair reflection of Lex Greensill.
IT WAS THE era of the dotcom boom – even farmers in remote Bundaberg had taken notice. Tech or internet businesses were all the rage. If you wanted to earn a fortune, the tech scene was where you needed to be. Lex wanted in on it and moved to Sydney’s richer pastures.
He went to the office of Robert Cleland, a wealthy Australian businessman who’d run some of Australia’s biggest construction and architectural firms. He was a smart, eloquent speaker with movie-star looks. Lex strode into his office as though he owned the place, brimming with confidence.
‘I want to come work for you,’ he told Cleland. ‘And here are my terms.’ Greensill laid out a package that would make seasoned executives blush. He had hardly any experience to speak of, but wanted a bigger salary than Cleland would have paid an experienced company director. Cleland declined Lex’s proposal. But he was impressed by Lex’s chutzpah. Cleland had some space at Australia Square, an office and shopping complex on George Street, in Sydney’s Central Business District. He let hungry young executives who were interested in e-commerce work there. It was a kind of skunkworks for wannabe Australian tech entrepreneurs. Lex took a desk. He quickly made a name for himself, though it wasn’t always a good one. Sure, he was bright and ambitious. But he also came across as rude and arrogant, as though he thought he was better than everyone else. Still, Lex had a foot in the door.
CLELAND WAS AN architect by training. He had studied at Melbourne University and Harvard, and then become chairman at Stephenson and Turner, one of Australia’s top architectural firms, responsible for the design of some of the country’s most prominent buildings. By the 1990s, S&T was an international business, with offices in New Zealand, Singapore and Hong Kong.
And then it all went wrong.
The business was too closely concentrated on relationships with just six key clients. When a shift in the Australian economy sent interest rates spiralling, five of S&T’s clients were unable to pay for work they’d commissioned. Cleland took the advice of his accountants and closed shop.
Then in his fifties, Cleland was not going to retire to the golf course or the beach. He enjoyed work and a new venture was never too far from the front of his mind. He had been fascinated by the potential of computers since the 1980s, when he’d picked up Apple Mac parts from a street-side reseller in Taiwan and put it together himself in his hotel room. A couple of decades later, the internet promised to revolutionize business. Cleland saw an opportunity.
At S&T, one problem the company had faced on large projects was how to make cash flow efficiently from property owners to contractors, subcontractors and suppliers. It was in everyone’s interest to make cash move fast and have supplies turn up on time. But things didn’t always work that way. Cleland and a couple of close associates dabbled in electronic invoice settlement – paying invoices over the internet. That would get funds moving through the supply chain more quickly and prevent costly hiccups and delays in construction projects.
After S&T collapsed, Cleland and a couple of his former colleagues began to put together a business plan for a kind of prototype ‘supply chain finance’ firm. An electronic platform would process invoices instantly, with funding from a bank that would take a small fee. Suppliers would be paid early. Buyers could make their payments later. The whole system would mean that the payments and invoices shuttling between companies would work more smoothly than in the past, and Cleland and his team would make a very tidy profit along the way. They talked to potential clients, including some of Australia’s largest companies. The feedback was positive. A new business named OzEcom was born. Almost.
By September 1999, Lex was working full-time on OzEcom. He was a kind of roving salesman, research consultant and fundraiser rolled into one. Lex worked on the business plan, developed a sales strategy, marketed OzEcom to clients, and sought out new investment. They began rolling out OzEcom to a handful of businesses on a trial basis. Cleland had already attracted a few hundred thousand dollars in venture capital, from a few dozen investors, including friends and family of staff. But they were constantly looking for more sources of investment. Lex tapped up his mother and brother and other Bundaberg connections too.
In November, the start-up was looking at a potential $5 million equity fundraising. Cleland hired investment bankers. They had accountants Arthur Andersen providing advice. French bank Société Générale was to fund the SCF deals. But the deal never got off the ground. Within months, the dotcom bubble had well and truly burst, leaving OzEcom thoroughly deflated. There was suddenly far less appetite for floating shares in internet-based businesses.
Cleland believed that part of the problem was the Australian market. It was too small. He decided to restart the business in London. He flew to the UK, leaving OzEcom in the hands of the – mostly – young guns in the Sydney office. Cleland’s idea was that he’d relaunch the business, and then reverse-engineer a takeover of OzEcom from the UK. After all, he was still the biggest shareholder in what was left of the company. Instead, while he was away, the team in Sydney tried to kick Cleland out altogether. A legal battle ensued, with each side accusing the other of dirty tricks. Cleland, who firmly believed that the future of the business lay in London, cut his losses. OzEcom folded soon after.
Lex later told me that he had put A$250,000 into OzEcom and lost it all. He said OzEcom collapsed because ‘the big people at the top of the company were not able to keep up with my ability to sell.’ The experience, he said, left him ‘like a dog with a bone,’ determined never to lose his grip on success again.
ON 11 SEPTEMBER 2001, while the world watched in horror as terrorists flew planes into the World Trade Center in New York, Lex Greensill was at the British Potato Conference. Lex had moved to the UK and taken a consulting role with Robert Cleland’s new, UK-based SCF business, Transaction Risk Mitigation, or TRM. It was a kind of supercharged version of OzEcom, based in Golden Square, in Soho, London. Lex was researching potential clients, especially agricultural business. He was talking with QV Foods, one of the UK’s largest potato-packing businesses, which counted Tesco, Sainsbury’s and Marks & Spencer as key customers. Lex reported back that QV’s leadership would ‘support, endorse and would immediately participate in a TRM Programme that paid both growers and themselves for potatoes as they are packed.’
This was mundane stuff. The grubby work of a junior staffer at a start-up business trying to make a go of it at the unglamorous end of trade and finance. Lex’s notes were detailed and thorough. He also met with a pea-producing cooperative that sold most of its peas to a giant frozen food company. Lex was not constrained by the humdrum nature of the TRM business. Despite being a very junior member of the team, he was ambitious and cast the net far and wide for new opportunities. He flew round the world and stayed at luxurious hotels and spoke to senior executives at grocery chains, food wholesalers and agribusiness groups in Australia and Asia and Europe.
Cleland had very particular views on the UK’s business culture. The rules were different from the laid-back scene in Australia. It was critically important to wear the right suit, the right tie, the right shirt. These were class markers that would open doors and get deals done.
‘In business, you have to be ready for combat,’ he’d tell his associates. ‘You have to play the game. Dressing down is a game for juniors, because the seniors are dressing up.’
It was a message that Lex took on board and held dear for decades. He and Cleland were close. Greensill started wearing a single-breasted cashmere banker’s coat, identical to the one the veteran Cleland always wore. When Greensill decided to go to business school in Manchester and study for an MBA (Master of Business Administration) in 2004, Cleland wrote a letter supporting his admission and his visa application. ‘We have found Lex’s entrepreneurial skills equally at home with senior management of established leading City firms and regional small businesses.’ Cleland had made a habit of supporting young staff if they needed funding or support for study programmes. He had given Lex a full-time role at TRM to help pay him through the studies. When Lex got married, to a British doctor named Victoria, in a traditional ceremony close to her home in northwest England, Cleland was asked to make a speech. He talked about starting the greatest adventure life can give you; that it was important not to take things too seriously, but always give it your best shot; to take the bad days and the good days with the same spirit.
Lex could also be a difficult employee and colleague. At one meeting of TRM’s directors Lex attended, though he was a junior member of the team, he slammed the board for not following up on leads and he complained that targets were always changing. It was a step out of line for the young Greensill. Cleland pushed back, vigorously defending his track record. The older man held firm, but Lex was clearly bristling with ambition.
Ultimately, though Lex sometimes upset his colleagues, there was a view that his frustration was born out of commitment, competitiveness and a sense of urgency, none of which were particularly bad traits at an entrepreneurial firm like TRM, so long as there were others who could keep him in line.
Cleland was also a stickler for documentation. Everything was conducted in meticulous fashion. He was putting together a kind of blueprint for a new type of supply chain financing. If it was successful, it could be rolled out around the world. The roadmap was all laid out for Cleland, Lex and others involved to use over and over.
TRM was gaining traction. Cleland had attracted an experienced board and heavyweight supporters. Merrill Lynch and Deutsche Bank and HSBC were interested in his work. Barclays agreed to a potential funding deal – the bank discussed providing about $200 million of funding for an SCF-type programme. German software company SAP, Hong Kong-based conglomerate Jardine Matheson, UK water company United Utilities and many others were interested in becoming clients. Cleland had an agreement with French insurance company CoFace to provide trade credit insurance to the TRM programme too.
And then, almost at the last minute, the rug was pulled out from under the firm. CoFace found that its own backers no longer had an appetite for the SCF programme. Without the insurance, Barclays also withdrew. The proposal collapsed. TRM struggled on for a while. It morphed into another similar electronic trade finance business. But the momentum was gone. Cleland eventually returned to Australia.
Lex meanwhile had enjoyed some better luck. For a short time, towards the end of OzEcom, he’d done some work for another tech start-up called 5th Finger. It was a kind of SMS marketing venture that used mobile phones to deliver content and advertising. Lex had helped the company’s founders develop a business plan and pitch it to telecoms companies. When he moved to the UK, he’d tried to set up a 5th Finger office there and develop an international strategy. It was hard to gain a foothold though, and the start-up cut him loose in early 2001 as it focused on Australia. Years later, when 5th Finger was sold to a unit of Microsoft, the early stakeholders, including Lex, each made a small fortune.
By the time TRM ended, Lex had already moved on. He was studying at Manchester, and he was making inroads elsewhere. He lost touch with Cleland, though he’d taken a lot from being around the seasoned businessman. He’d seen Cleland’s blueprint for a technology-driven supply chain finance up close and personal. He’d also seen how good business ideas could suffer from fickle business partners. And he’d learned that, if you want to get on, dressing the part is important too.