PNG's ex-PM Peter O'Neill buys $6m Warrawee house as Point Piper digs quietly sold
The wife of Papua New Guinea’s former prime minister Peter O’Neill, Lynda Babao, has bought a $6 million house on Sydney’s Upper North Shore just months after a Point Piper residence that was previously home to their son was sold on the quiet for $12.35 million.
The Point Piper duplex was linked to PNG’s former first family in May last year just days before O’Neill stepped down from the top job following weeks of high-level defections from the ruling party.
At the time it was reported by the Australian Financial Review that his son Brian was living at the Point Piper residence, despite the property being owned by one of PNG’s richest people and one of O’Neill’s closest associates Sir Theo Constantinou.
Records show the three-level property on Point Piper’s Wolseley Road exchanged off-market last September but was only lodged in new owner Shi Wei’s name when it settled more than nine months later.
Corporate filings show property investors Shi and Feng Miao Ting previously lived at the architect Michael Suttor-designed residence until 2015 when it was sold to Sir Theo by Irene Lee, a member of one of Hong Kong’s richest families and chair of Hysan Development.
Mr O’Neill returned from Sydney to PNG in May to give evidence at a corruption inquiry into the UBS loan affair in which the country’s leaders are accused of breaking the law in 2014 in approving a $US1.2 billion load from the Swiss bank. The inquiry is ongoing.
The newly purchased residence of Ms Babao for $5.95 million is a six-bedroom, Hamptons-inspired residence designed by US-born architect John Amory set on 1800 square metres.
Set on dress-circle Pibrac Avenue, it was listed in February by Di Jones’s Tim Fraser on behalf of Jones Lang LaSalle Hotels and Hospitality chairman Scott Hetherington and his artist wife Adele, given the couple’s plans to downsize to the northern beaches.
It previously traded for $3.575 million in 2013 when sold by Ava and Ross Clarke, founder of the structural engineer firm Enstruct Group.