British villagers have told how they caught American billionaire Stephen Schwarzman secretly trucking in water to fill a private lake on his $110 million country estate during a drought, forcing authorities to shut the operation down.
Schwarzman, the 78-year-old Blackstone co-founder who is worth more than $40 billion, bought the 2,500-acre Conholt Park estate in Wiltshire in 2022. While local residents in Tangley, Hampshire, faced outdoor water-use bans this summer, they began noticing convoys of tankers heading to his property at night, The Wall Street Journal reported.
One resident, refrigeration consultant Lawrence Leask, told the Journal how he helped bust the clandestine operation. Leask said he staked out the road at 3 a.m. to follow a truck. He explained how he “charmed” the driver into revealing his destination.
What started as suspicion then turned into a grassroots investigation into the man who sat beside British Prime Minister Keir Starmer during the royal banquet for President Donald Trump during his U.K. state visit last month.
Villagers diligently logged license plates, traced tanker routes, and tipped off officials. Days later, Southern Water barred further deliveries to the estate, saying the shipments had broken the spirit, though not the letter, of drought rules. Southern Water managing director Tim McMahon said he was “appalled by this use of water.”
Leask told the BBC that he reckoned there were “30 tankers a day, seven days a week” headed to the hilltop estate.
A Conholt Park spokesperson said in a statement that “all water used at Conholt has been lawfully and properly extracted, purchased, transported and used,” and denied allegations of illegal groundwater pumping.
She added that the water went toward filling the newly dredged lake for just three weeks during the summer, and not all of it. Southern Water estimates the site drank nearly 265,000 gallons of water daily, sources told the Journal. By comparison, the whole county uses 43.6 million gallons over more than 1,400 square miles.
According to the Journal, the deliveries had drew from standpipes designated for fire engines, even as local households were banned from watering their lawns and gardens. Over the summer, villagers watched as water tankers rumbled through Tangley on their way to Conholt Park, part of a frantic push to finish renovations on the estate before a September deadline.
In nearby Andover, residents and workers scoped the trucks lining up at hydrants in both an industrial zone and a subdivision.
Schwarzman’s spokesperson pinned that decision on tanker companies. “The estate has no involvement in determining where they source their water,” she told the Journal.
“We’re very happy to have a new neighbor. We’re not envious of his wealth,” said Philip Wray, a retired dentist who was part of the crack squad of amateur investigators.
Schwarzman hired a manager from King Charles’ Cotswolds estate to oversee his renovation of the site. The billionaire bought a neighboring farm to host game shoots, and his property now resembles “an American vision of a quintessentially English hunting estate,” according to Catherine Hawkins, a nearby resident.
Some neighbors told the Journal that they believe Schwarzman’s team was sneakily siphoning water from boreholes. The billionaire’s spokesperson denied that allegation to the newspaper, saying that Conholt had deployed a “highly sophisticated water-collection system” for rain.
“We laughed,” said Wray. “There’s been no rain.”
And despite water authorities restricting the operation, locals are not done with their guerrilla investigation. Leask is convinced it is much bigger than what is currently known.
The Conholt spokeswoman said no more trucked water is going into the lake, but tankers are still whizzing down country roads—leading locals to think there are other water sources.
Representatives for Schwarzman did not immediately respond to a request for comment from the Daily Beast.
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