That reminds me of a UK property developer:
He had agricultural land that couldn't be used for residential building and bought old french wooden buildings that were assebled with wooden pegs, disassembled them, shipped them to the UK, re-erected them and then claimed that they'd been there for many years and thereby got planning permission "retrospectively" .
He got away with it quite a few times and made a lot of money before theysussed him!