Australia’s fourth-richest person will officially relocate to the US with his family after being awarded the honorary title of Colonel in one American state.
Billionaire cardboard box magnate Anthony Pratt, 64, whose $23.3billion fortune also ranks him among the richest 250 people in the world, has begun using the honorific on his social media and it even appears on his Wikipedia entry.
But despite a friendship with the president-elect stretching back years, which allegedly saw him once given US nuclear secrets, it wasn’t Trump who gave him the title but rather the Democratic Governor of Kentucky, Andy Beshear.
Pratt was made a non-military colonel by Beshear after dropping $1billion for a new recycled paper mill in the Bluegrass State billed as the world’s greenest.
The Henderson-based 42,000sqm mill, two hours north of Nashville, was touted as one of the key projects in relaunching the US as a domestic manufacturing powerhouse.
At the facility’s opening on September 14 last year, Pratt and Beshear were joined by Lonnie Ali, the widow of boxing legend Muhammad Ali, who was born in Louisville, Kentucky.
And the 750 guests were served up a banquet of KFC courtesy of perhaps the state’s most well-known colonel, one Harland Sanders.
Taking to LinkedIn last week, Colonel Pratt revealed he had been granted a green card for permanent US residency and would be moving there with his family after spending the majority of his time there in recent years.
Pratt said that since the early 1990s his company, known as Visy in Australia and New Zealand and Pratt Industries in the US, has built a significant footprint in America by investing in 70 factories and creating 12,000 jobs.
‘We decided it was time to live in America because my family are all US citizens,’ Pratt said.
‘I will remain Chairman of Visy Australia, and will be returning to Australia on a regular basis.’
Pratt was a vocal supporter of Trump during his previous presidency, praising him on what was formerly Twitter, and taking out full page ads in the Wall Street Journal.
In 2017 he became a member of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club in Florida for a reported near half-a-million dollar joining fee, which saw the two become friends.
‘The key thing about being a member,’ Pratt told an Australian function, according to The Australian Jewish News.
‘Is that I see President Trump two or three times a year, and each time I would tell him about our manufacturing business
‘My early support resonated with Trump, who takes things very personally, and he remembers it.’
Pratt claimed Trump’s tax cuts and corporate write-off initiatives has encouraged him to invest and create jobs.
His company has built six of its last eight paper mills in the US and the Henderson mill will be joined by a cardboard box factory in 2026 in another jobs boost for an estimated 30,000 residents.
That being said Pratt has also commended incumbent president Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act for being a ‘game changer’ for regional centres like Henderson which had been hit with the brunt of the ‘core-out of American manufacturing’ and the off-shoring of industries to places like China.
In 2023, America’s ABC News reported that Trump had discussed sensitive national security matters with Pratt shortly after he left office.
It claimed Pratt had shared the information, said to be America’s fleet of nuclear submarines and how close they can get to Russian subs, with about 45 people.
Trump fiercely denied the reports and branded Pratt a ‘red haired weirdo from Australia’ in a post on his social media site Truth Social.
‘I never spoke to him about Submarines, but I did speak to him about creating jobs in Ohio and Pennsylvania, because that’s what I’m all about – JOBS, A GREAT ECONOMY, LOW TAXES, NO INFLATION, ENERGY DOMINANCE, STRONG BORDERS, NO ENDLESS WARS, LOW INTEREST RATES, and much more!,’ Trump wrote on his own social network platform TruthSocial in October 2023.
Pratt was later interviewed by US law enforcement agencies, according to Bloomberg.
The billionaire’s move to the US comes following Trump’s victory in the presidential race against Democrat Vice President Kamala Harris.
The stock market soared following the news, with two of America’s main three stock indexes hitting record highs.
A sweeping Trump victory has powered bets of a business-friendly agenda, with expectations of lower corporate taxes and looser regulations.
