ST. JOHNS COUNTY, Fla. – Who was behind the failed Guana Preserve land swap deal?
The general public still doesn’t know, thanks to the complex world of corporate anonymity, where it’s perfectly legal for LLCs to shield the identities of the true owners.
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But that hasn’t stopped legitimate media outlets — and at least one person who pretended to be a producer for “60 Minutes” — from trying to find out.
RELATED | Developers tied to controversial Guana River land swap proposal withdraw application for deal
According to a report published by The Tampa Bay Times on Wednesday, someone claiming to work for the popular CBS television news program that specializes in investigations called a St. Johns County fishing charter captain who had been involved in pushing back against the controversial deal and asked him who he thought might be behind it. The person, who said his name was “Oliver,” set up an interview with the captain.
But according to The Times’ reporting, the news program doesn’t employ any producer named Oliver, according to a spokesperson for CBS.
“They were pumping me for information about who I was talking to,” Captain Matt Chipperfield, whose social media videos about the issue have been viewed hundreds of thousands of times, told The Times. “It was nefarious in nature, but it also let me know that I said something that put pressure on somebody.”
Questions and rumors are still swirling about who the mysterious backers of the deal are.
The land swap proposal from The Upland LLC came to light just days before a vote. The proposal sparked immediate pushback from locals and conservationists.
Not even Florida lawmakers have been able to determine who was behind it.
”All we know is probably what you know, they were established in February and we don’t know the parties in particular,“ Florida State Rep. Kim Kendall said last month.
Kendall told The Times she has asked the Florida Department of Environmental Protection for weeks to reveal the person behind The Upland LLC so she can meet with them. Last week, the agency’s legislative affairs director, Brett Tubbs, told Kendall that “nobody” in the department knows the identity, The Times said.
News4JAX did some digging and found that The Upland LLC is registered to an entity called Contega Business Services, a company that provides LLC registration services and is also affiliated with a Jacksonville law firm.
That LLC registration company is the only identifiable information immediately available about who is responsible for the company.
It’s a similar situation with New Outpost LLC – the company that owns the piece of land next to the Guana Preserve – that was mentioned in the land swap application. That LLC traces back to Contega Business Services as well – with no other identifiable contacts.
Locals and conservationists want to know who wanted to get a hold of public conservation land.
Financial expert Joe Krier who works for Tidal Flow Trading, said entities like the Contega group help companies maintain their anonymity through LLC registration.
“I can certainly understand why [people would] want to know who’s behind it, and I can understand why the people proposing it would not want to be known, because they knew it would be controversial with the conservationists in North Florida,” Krier said.
Krier said federal law can require the identity of the backers to be released.
“If they really needed to, there is a Corporate Transparency Act that was effective in 2024 that requires LLCs to report beneficial ownership information on FinCEN, and it’s, you know, it’s a public database. They call it that. But really, you’d have to get a federal regulator involved to look under the hood and see who’s really behind it,” he said.
News4JAX also spoke with business expert and attorney Parag Amin, who says even if the land swap deal was approved, the identities of the LLC members could have remained unknown.
