A BUSINESSMAN allegedly used tens of millions of pounds from a council to buy luxury goods including a £12 million private jet, an investigation has uncovered.

According to leaked documents from a Panorama probe, Liam Kavanagh used Thurrock Council funds to buy other flashy items including a Bugatti Chiron for £2 million and a yacht for £16 million.

According to Companies House, Kavanagh has previously lived at several addresses in Salisbury, as well as having multiple businesses registered in Salisbury.

Thurrock Council invested £655 million into Kavanagh’s solar farm business Rockfire.

Kavanagh’s legal team told the BBC the payments were approved by his company’s finance team and auditor, and that all the payments were permissible.

Thurrock Council started investing money in Kavanagh’s business in 2016.

The council wanted regular interest payments from the profits and believed the cash would be protected because it was secured against the value of solar farms.

However, interest payments halted after Kavanagh shut his companies, meaning the estimated value of the farms is less than the council initially thought.

The investigation, led by BBC Panorama and The Bureau of Investigate Journalism, exposed how the value of Liam Kavanagh’s solar farms was inflated to persuade the council to invest more cash.

The revelations come days after Thurrock Council rejected calls for an “independent” inquiry into the “catastrophic” failures of its investment strategy that led to a £1.3 billion debt.

During a portfolio re-evaluation in 2018, Rockfire gave valuers a power price of £61.45 per megawatt hour, according to the Panorama programme.

Yet the average power price of the portfolio was actually £46.92 per megawatt hour.

In 2020, Kavanagh’s staff told him the average power price was predicted to be £41.70 per megawatt hour but he decided to tell valuers the price was £62 per megawatt hour.

An email, seen by BBC Panorama and The Bureau of Investigate Journalism, from Kavanagh in 2020 suggests he always intended on spending council funds on himself.

It read: “These funds will be used to create a new family investment office and to create wealth for years to come. This has always been my plan.”

Aside from the expensive purchases, a further £40 million disappeared into a bank account labelled “other”.

Kavanagh no longer lives in the UK.