Aussie billionaire Anthony Pratt makes a permanent move to US

Australian packaging billionaire Anthony Pratt is moving permanently to the US after receiving a green card last month, he has confirmed on LinkedIn.

“Honoured to be granted my Green Card for permanent USA residency last month,” he said in his post and cited several reasons for the move, including the fact his family are all US citizens and his significant business interests in the US.

Anthony Pratt at the 2024 Met Gala in New York. Credit: Getty Images

“Over the past 30 years, we have invested to build 70 factories in America, creating 12,000 well-paying American manufacturing jobs.”

His privately held Pratt Industries is one of the fastest-growing players in America’s $US35 billion ($53 billion) packaging sector.

Pratt’s name has not gone unnoticed in US political and social circles.

In May, Pratt attended New York’s Met Gala – alongside the likes of Kim Kardashian and Jennifer Lopez – in a hot-pink frock coat embroidered with “Pratt 100% Recycled” decals, more commonly seen on his Visy and Pratt Industries’ cardboard boxes.

But it was his relationship with US President-elect Donald Trump that garnered interest, starting with his claim of winning $450,000 by betting $100,000 on Trump to win the 2016 election.

This year a CNN report aired allegations of Pratt trying to buy access to Trump.

In an exclusive interview with CNN, Brian Butler, a central witness in the investigation into Trump’s handling of classified documents, reported that Pratt – a member of the Mar-a-Lago club – flew in for a meeting with Trump in April 2021 and later divulged top secrets.

After the meeting, Butler claims Pratt got in a car with him and his chief of staff, who asked him: “How did it go?”

According to Butler, the chairman of multinational paper and packaging company Visy Industries immediately divulged classified information that Trump had given him “about Russian submarines and US submarines”.

“I’m in the car. I’m like, ‘Did I just hear that?’” Butler recalled. “He went straight to the point, he told me … something that in my mind would more than likely be classified.”

In a draft copy of a speech Pratt delivered to a Jewish group in late 2019, he describes how he “became a member of the Mar-a- Lago resort” as a “strategic” play to secure access to Trump.

The CNN revelations followed reports last year by this masthead and 60 Minutes, which uncovered separate audio recordings of Pratt talking about his relationship with “mafia”-like Trump and his claim of a $US1 million payment to Trump’s lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, in return for Giuliani attending his birthday party.

The covert recordings also reveal that Pratt had claimed Trump disclosed non-public details about US military action in Iraq and a private conversation with Iraq’s leader.

Then-president Donald Trump and Anthony Pratt during the official opening of Pratt Industries’ Wapakoneta recycling and paper plant in Ohio in 2019.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen

Trump dismissed those accounts at the time, posting on social media that the stories “about a red-haired weirdo from Australia, named Anthony Pratt, is Fake News”.

However, the investigation substantiated previous reporting from America’s ABC News that suggested Trump shared more classified information than was previously known.

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