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January 29, 2026 — 5:00am
Felix Ming Ze Lee has a big job ahead of him this year. The 25-year-old is tasked with repairing relations with his NSW Mid North Coast neighbours after years of environmental damage on his father’s private retreat, all while he launches his own independent family office.
Helping him kick-start his investment career is the family fortune, estimated at $1.66 billion when his dad, Phillip Dong Fang Lee, was last ranked on The Australian Financial Review Rich List in 2024.
Not helping are suggestions that his father is in any way involved in the newly launched Lee Family Office set up to manage the family’s investments.
The Lee family patriarch is best known locally as a high-roller gambler who turned over $2.7 billion through Sydney’s The Star casino over 15 years. The reclusive billionaire also made headlines when his Australian assets were frozen over a $272 million tax debt, and for overseeing a slew of environmental breaches at the family’s bushland getaway at Fame Cove on the NSW Mid North Coast.
Separating Lee snr’s high profile and billions of dollars from the endeavours of his 25-year-old son is no easy feat.
Enter Joe Hockey, the former federal treasurer, ex-ambassador to the United States and head of investment and advisory firm Bondi Partners, who has added to his already impressive resumé by taking up the role of chairman of Felix Lee’s family office.
“Felix is pursuing his own path and is entitled to be judged on his own conduct, decisions and standards,” Hockey said. “The Lee Family Office is 100 per cent Felix Lee – with its own governance, purpose and operating boundaries.”
Felix Lee declined to comment on the launch of his family office, but was forthcoming last year in his bid to resolve a long-running dispute with locals and MidCoast Council over the family’s private bushland retreat and marine sanctuary at Fame Cove.
The 400-hectare property was purchased 20 years ago for $8.8 million by his mother Xiaobei Shi amid some fairly grand plans by Lee snr. There was the award-winning architect Peter Stutchbury-designed eco-resort, an 18-hole golf course, an 11-bedroom mansion atop Fame Mountain, and even a quarry.
But overshadowing those plans were a series of environmental breaches going back to 2009, when Lee was issued an almost $200,000 fine, followed by further fines in 2014 and 2019, and Land and Environment Court orders for remediation as recently as the end of 2024.
It generated a lot of bad publicity and galvanised community action groups.
“I’ve stepped in because I believe it’s time to fix this and move on – for the council, for the community, and for my family,” Felix Lee said.
“My father didn’t always have the right advice around him, and that unfortunately created misunderstandings with council and created frustration and concern in the community.
“It’s obvious given the historic animosity that the past strategy created challenges – the entire approach could and should have been communicated better.”
To that end, Lee has lodged a development application to subdivide the four blocks that constitute the 400 hectares into nine lots of 40 to 55 hectares each, with provision for a house and access roads on each block.
“Once the DA process is completed, we can engage with council on biodiversity stewardships to ensure that the ecological balance of the headland remains protected in perpetuity, generating biodiversity credits and securing the area’s environmental value for future generations,” Lee said.
He’ll then sell the blocks.
If Felix Lee was hoping the intended olive branch would win over locals, he will be disappointed.
Of the 93 submissions lodged in response to the development application, there are dozens of objections from residents, community groups and the local Gummipingal Traditional Owners Aboriginal Corporation, with concerns over the loss of Indigenous heritage, scale of the roadworks, and long-held hopes to have the once-pristine bushland and marine sanctuary designated as a national park.
“This land has long been proposed for acquisition for conservation, but that becomes more remote once it is subdivided,” said Ian Donovan, Hunter branch secretary of the National Parks Association of NSW.
Neighbour and former Commonwealth Bank senior executive Ross Griffiths said no DA should be approved, given the lack of transparency over the status of the court-ordered rehabilitation of the land.
MidCoast Council is yet to clarify if the court-ordered remediation works have been completed.
Last year, before the latest DA was lodged, council submitted a proposal to the state’s planning department to protect the land as a significant natural habitat by rezoning it from rural land to C2 environmental conservation.
Attempts to have the site designated as a national park go back to the 1990s, when it was first put to parliament by then-Labor MP Bob Martin, a local, and later offered to the National Parks and Wildlife Service by Boral for $1.1 million.
When the money couldn’t be raised, it was sold to private interests.
Corporate records reveal Felix Lee is also co-director of the Terrey Hills Golf and Country Club. Appointed when he was 20, he has since been joined as a co-director by his uncle, Victor Lin, and younger brother Edward Lee, now 21.
The exclusive club with Sydney’s first championship golf course was among the family’s big-ticket assets to be frozen in 2021 by the tax office in pursuit of a $272 million debt. As that stoush was being played out in the Federal Court, the golf club also came under scrutiny when it claimed $700,000 in JobKeeper benefits amid a year of bumper profits.
The freeze orders on the family assets – including the family’s $40 million Point Piper home, an apartment next door that is Felix Lee’s registered home, extensive rural holdings, and a fleet of luxury cars – have since been lifted. The tax dispute was settled in the Federal Court in 2022.
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