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Lex Greensill’s family has quietly invested in a company that claims to make environmentally friendly carbon products from discarded coconut shells, the latest move by the disgraced financier since the collapse of his lender Greensill Capital The first known investment since .
Offshore company filings show that the Greensill family investment arm became a shareholder in Panthera Global Activated Carbon last year. The company uses “environmentally sourced waste coconut shells” to produce a material used in gold ore extraction and water filtration. The investment was made by a group of former senior executives from Greensill Capital.
Greensill Capital collapsed in 2021, sparking criminal investigations in multiple countries and sending investors in its complex financial products scrambling to recover billions of dollars. But the family of its founder, Lex Greensill, and other early investors cashed in hundreds of millions of dollars by selling stock in the company before it collapsed.
For example, Japanese tech conglomerate SoftBank’s Vision Fund paid $174 million in late 2019 to acquire a stake in the Peter Greensill Family Trust, according to a report by Greensill Capital’s Australian administrators. Lex Greensill was previously named in Australian court proceedings as a beneficiary of the trust, named after his brother Peter, who manages the Greensill family’s sweet potato and watermelon growing business in Bundaberg, Australia.
Panthera was launched last year to produce activated carbon from “sustainably sourced” coconut shells. Activated charcoal is heated to increase its ability to absorb other materials.
While the company is registered in Jersey, its main operations are in Kenya, where “teams of people in villages and townships” are said to collect the discarded coconut shells used by Panthera.
Panthera’s shareholders include Cultivar International, an Australian company co-owned by Peter Greensill Family Co, the trustee of the Peter Greensill Family Trust, and Cultivar Investors, a Florida-based company linked to US businessman John Gorman.
Gorman was one of Greensill Capital’s earliest outside backers and was named the firm’s “chairman emeritus” when the financial firm collapsed in 2021. His daughter Marisa Gorman Lazatin is a director of Cultivar International along with Peter Greensill. Razatin previously worked at Greensill Capital and is now a partner in a “private family office,” according to her LinkedIn account.
A spokesman for the Greensill family told the FT: “The Greensill family has been farmers for three generations and we have a strong focus on sustainability. “Panthera is an innovative start-up that uses agricultural waste to produce sustainable activated carbon . Cultivar was created to allow us to invest in Panthera and support its growth, so one day it might be able to help us at Greensill Farming.”
Lawyers for Lazatin and Gorman did not respond to a request for comment.
Panthera’s other shareholders include Alastair Eadie and Jonathan Lane, who are Greensill Capital’s Group Finance Director and General Counsel respectively. Eadie describes himself as Panthera’s co-founder and CEO on his LinkedIn account. The Solicitors Regulation Authority register lists Lane as working at Cultivar International UK. –
“It’s a private company and I’m not really interested in talking to anyone,” Edie told the FT.
Lane did not respond to a LinkedIn request for comment.
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