Concrete king cheated ailing mum, contaminated land, sister claims in court

One of Queensland’s richest men is being sued by his own sister over allegations he cheated his family out of what could be millions of dollars and secretly contaminated their land with asbestos.

One of Queensland’s richest men allegedly cheated his own family out of what could be millions of dollars, skimming profits and secretly contaminating the family’s land with asbestos, a court has heard.

The bitter legal stoush embroiling multi-millionaire Raymond Edwin Neilsen, 72, from Ascot, threatens to tear apart the family behind the state’s biggest family owned cement, gravel and dirt company.

Leonie Margaret Merker, 63, from Cashmere in Brisbane’s north, has sued her brother in the Federal Court in Sydney claiming he has been cheating her, and their late mother Ruby, out of income and skimming off profits via excessive management fees for himself, and secretly allowing the family’s land to be used as a dump for deadly asbestos and other pollutants including car tyres, waste metal and unprocessed organic matter.

The lawsuit is the culmination of a long-simmering dispute which has meant that the siblings families have barely spoken since 2011.

Ray Neilsen shopping in Newstead yesterday

Mr Neilsen draws a $500,000 salary and is a regular drinker at the Tattersall’s Club in the city and lives in a $4m Art Deco mansion in Ascot’s most prestigious street, with his third wife Paula, and drives a Range Rover with personalised “Neilsen” registration plates.

He moved to Ascot last year after selling his $7.35m riverfront penthouse in Pier South at Newstead and regularly holidays at his $2.5m apartment in Buddina on the Sunshine Coast.

Pre-COVID-19 he was a keen traveller and used to ski every year at the Big White ski resort in Canada, where he owned a chalet which has since been sold.

He has sold over $20m worth of property – jointly owned with Mrs Merker and his mother – in the past year, property records show.

Mrs Merker and Mr Neilsen together own a fortune worth about $550m forged in the flood plains in Brisbane’s north where their entrepreneurial parents Ernie and Ruby built Neilsen’s Cement from nothing in the 1970s on land then considered worthless.

The couple had the foresight to see the potential in harvesting the sand and gravel along the banks and surrounding land of the South Pine River, on flood prone land that no-one else wanted.

The 200 hectares of land straddling Brendale and Bald Hills along the South Pine River owned by family companies owned by Leonie Merker and Ray Neilsen.

The fortune is made up of about 200 hectares of prime development land worth about $400m straddling both Brendale and Bald Hills – on which the family sand and gravel quarry and cement plant sits – and the Neilsen’s cement company worth about $150m.

The land is bordered by the Linkfield Connection Rd and Gympie Rd, west of the M1 motorway.

The company’s fleet of 48 concrete trucks and 180 staff have supplied hundreds of thousands of tonnes of concrete aggregates and soil for the construction of the airports second runway and supplied concrete panels for the airport link tunnel, and helped build Westfield Chermside, the Legacy Way tunnel, the Gurner FV building in Fortitude Valley and the Eatons Hill Hotel.

It supplies to councils in Brisbane City, Moreton Bay, Ipswich and Scenic Rim as well as the state main roads department.

The Brendale land is valuable because it sits just 17km north of the Brisbane CBD and next to a fast-growing industrial estate, a Bunnings and the motorway.

Neilsen’s distinctive green, yellow and white concrete mixer trucks are a common sight on the streets of Brisbane, with cement plants at Windsor, Carole Park, Stapleton and Cryna, near Beaudesert.

The late Ruby Neilsen and daughter Leonie Merker, pictured earlier this year, just weeks before Mrs Neilsen died.

In an extraordinary corporate and family feud, Ms Merker claims she has been oppressed as a shareholder and has asked the court to remove her brother as director of ten family companies and launch a probe into the losses allegedly racked up by Mr Neilsen’s alleged frauds.

She has also asked the court to award her compensation for the alleged losses.

Mrs Merker alleges Mr Neilsen has oppressed her as a shareholder and concealed his own breaches of fiduciary duties from her to gain exclusive control of Neilsen corporate group.

The lawsuit, filed before Christmas, was also launched in the name of their mother, family matriarch Ruby Margaret Neilsen.

She lived a modest life in her home in Bald Hills overlooking the family quarry until just a few years before her death.

An aerial view of the 200 hectares of Neilsen family land next to the South Pine River in Brendale and Bald Hills which is home to their gravel and sand quarry, cement plant and several houses. Source: Google Maps

She died aged 95 last Saturday. Her funeral is on Friday.

Mrs Merker’s court claim alleges her brother gained control of several family companies after the death of their father in 2007 and then has been running the business as his own personal fiefdom, claiming he is a “permanent governing director” and can’t be removed.

However Mr Neilsen is a minority shareholder in the family group of companies behind his late mother and Mrs Merker, who together own over two-thirds of the family fortune.

Mrs Merker claims family trusts of which she is a beneficiary have been deprived of income after Mr Neilsen sold two industrial plots of land at Brendale, next to the family quarry, for less than their true value.

The late Ruby Neilsen at Neilsen’s Concrete in Brendale.

Mrs Merker has also accused her brother of fraudulently expropriating trust income by having two sets of books for the Brendale quarry.

He is accused of using the second set of books to understate the quarry’s actual revenue by not recording trucks dumping “acid sulfate polluted waste” on the land.

He is accused of both degrading the land, and shrinking its value by dumping the waste on the land, as well as exposing family companies to substantial penalties for breaching environmental permits which only allow clean waste to be used to fill existing holes, and ban contaminated waste.

According to Mrs Merker’s claim he is also accused of expropriating a lucrative corporate opportunity to import cement from Asia via a 2017 joint venture deal called Southern Cross Cement.

Mrs Merker claims Mr Neilsen used family company assets as security to finance loans to fund the $10.8m needed to buy a one third stake into the Southern Cross Cement venture alongside the Neumann Group and $3B stockmarket listed building materials giant Brickworks.

The Neilsen’s Concrete batching plant in Brendale, which sits on the western edge of 200 hectares of family land.

Mr Neilsen’s lawyer Clayton Utz partner Ross Perrett did not respond to emails from The Sunday Mail seeking comment.

He is yet to file a defence to the claims.

The case is back in court in Sydney on February 10.