From TheTyee.ca – March 7, 2011
by Will McMartin
British Columbians frustrated by a looming 50 per cent increase
in their monthly power bills probably will feel no happier knowing that
BC Hydro intends to spend much of its newfound revenues on a $1 billion
Smart Metering Program to monitor every consumed kilowatt.
Well, here’s something that will make ratepayers feel even worse.
The very first smart meter contract BC
Hydro has awarded — $73 million to install up to 1.8 million of the new
devices — went to a company with close ties to the BC Liberals.
Indeed, that company is directly connected to a BC Hydro director.
The troubling trail of interlocking relationships starts with Tracey McVicar. She was named to the Crown corporation’s board of directors a little over three years ago.
While in her early twenties, in 1990,
McVicar earned a bachelor’s degree in finance from UBC and quickly went
to work in the investment banking division at RBC Dominion Securities.
Not long after, she left to join a
Vancouver-based brokerage, Goepel, Shields and Partners. By 1997, she
had become a partner at the firm and a member of its board of directors.
Goepel, Shields and Partners was bought in
2001 by Raymond James Financial Ltd., the Florida-headquartered
financial services behemoth, and two years later McVicar left to head up the Vancouver office of CAI Capital Management Ltd.
David Emerson ‘a longstanding investor’
CAI is a central link in this chain, as we shall see, so here’s a backgrounder.
A private firm that raises funds from select investors, CAI then uses that capital in a variety of ways, but usually by taking
equity positions in mid-size companies with the expectation of outsized
returns on their initial investment.
CAI was founded in 1989 by seven
well-heeled investors, including a couple of ex-Salomon Brothers
partners in New York, plus a prominent Montreal businessman, David
Culver, a former CEO with Alcan Aluminum Ltd.
In 1999, CAI bought a position in a well-known
but under-capitalized B.C. entity, MacDonald Dettwiler and Associates.
The investment firm obtained at least one seat on the MDA board, and it
was filled by Brooklyn-based Peter Restler, a founding CAI partner.
Restler has had a several decades long
relationship with B.C. politicians and well-heeled British Columbians.
One such prominent Vancouver businessman is Peter Bentley, the long-time
head of Canfor Corporation, who was an early investor in CAI.
In August 2001, David Emerson, then CEO at Bentley’s Canfor, joined the MacDonald Dettwiler board.
And if Emerson was not already an investor in CAI’s exclusive funds, he soon became one.
That information was disclosed on Nov. 24,
2008, when it was announced that Emerson — who just weeks earlier had
quit federal politics rather than seek re-election as a Conservative MP
in Vancouver East — had been hired (see here and here) by Restler, McVicar and CAI as a “senior advisor” at the equity firm’s Vancouver office.
Posted on CAI’s website is a wire story that features
the following sentence: “Emerson has also been a longstanding investor
in CAI, said Tracey McVicar, a managing director of CAI, who declined to
elaborate on the timing and amount of his investments.”
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