Australia’s secret billionaire adds $US1.7 billion to fortune in six months

Australia’s richest resident, New South Wales woman and US citizen Blair Parry-Okeden, has added a stunning $US1.7 billion to her fortune in just six months, according to Forbes magazine’s latest rankings of the richest Americans.

Known as Australia’s secret billionaire, Parry-Okeden is the richest person living in Australia and resides in near anonymity in the NSW regional town of Scone.

With a fortune estimated by Forbes at $US6.2 billion ($AUD6.5 million), she easily eclipses the $5.04 billion fortune of Frank Lowy.

Parry-Okeden’s fortune is built on her stake in US media and communications giant Cox Enterprises, which owns a sprawling empire of newspapers, radio stations, advertising companies and websites, including two of America’s leading car sales websites.

Parry-Okeden’s grandfather James Cox started the business in 1898 with the purchase of a newspaper in the town of Dayton, Ohio and later expanded the company to become one of the biggest newspaper owners in the country.

Blair Parry-Okeden inherited a 25% stake in US media company Cox Enterprises from her mother Barbara Cox Anthony, who died in 2007.

Parry-Okeden does not have a direct involvement in the company, which is chaired by her brother, Jim Kennedy.

Exactly why Forbes has boosted its valuation of Parry-Okeden from $US4.5 billion in its March list of the world’s billionaire’s to $US6.2 billion its Forbes 400 list of the richest Americans is unclear, although the fact that other Cox Enterprises shareholders on the list have risen by a similar percentage suggests the magazine may have re-valued the media giant.

Revenue at the conglomerate has risen from $US8 billion in 2000 to just under $US15 billion in 2009, although the company’s turnover did slip slightly in that year.

However, a slowly recovering US economy and a string of recent acquisitions should have boosted the company’s growth opportunities.

Little is known about Parry-Okeden’s background.

She trained as a teacher after graduating from a Hawaiian school that her mother helped to establish and later immigrated to Australia to marry Simon Parry-Okeden, whose family is well known in farming circles. They are now divorced but have two sons, Andrew and Henry.

She also wrote a children’s book called Down By The Gate (it reportedly tells the story of an advertisement Mother Goose places in a newspaper) and is listed as a school councillor on the website of the Scone Grammar School.

Parry-Okeden lives on a large property called Rockview Station.