EYES ON OLIGARCHS: The situation at Rogers is unfathomably messy
Billions of dollars, Donald Trump, John Tory, and the most consequential butt-dial in Canadian history
Where to begin?
We are currently in the midst of one of the most bitter, messy and spectacular public fights among family members at the very highest levels of Rogers Communications Inc, Canada’s second-largest telecom company.
(Half the relevant characters in this story are named Rogers, so I will henceforth be referring to the company as RCI to avoid confusion.)
This story includes possibly the most consequential butt-dial in Canadian history, a $26 billion corporate merger, Toronto’s mayor, a 3 a.m. Twitter blow-up, vicious public accusations, and of course Donald Trump makes a cameo appearance.
If you haven’t followed the story thus far, I’ll catch you up on all the relevant detail. At the outset, I will say that I’m relying heavily on reporting by Alexandra Posadzki at the Globe and Mail, who has done truly extraordinary work to shed light on the goings-on in real time.
Ok let’s start at the beginning…
The background
Rogers Communications Inc. was built by Ted Rogers, and it remains controlled by the family. RCI is a publicly traded company which means anybody can buy Class B non-voting shares and receive a dividend based on company profits.
But the Rogers family owns 97.5 per cent of the Class A voting shares through a family trust, along with about 10% of the Class B shares. So the family controls who’s on the board, which in turn oversees the executives who manage the company day-to-day.
The family trust is controlled by a 10-person advisory committee. Six of the 10 people are Rogers family members, including family matriarch Loretta Rogers, the widow of Ted Rogers. Toronto Mayor John Tory, who was once a senior executive at RCI and a close confidant to Ted Rogers also sits on the board, along with a few other people close to the family.
Edward Rogers, son of Ted Rogers, serves as chair of the family trust, and until the shit hit the fan this month, Edward was also chair of the RCI board. (This article contains a graphic with a good dramatis personae if you get confused.)
Edward Rogers apparently lives for messy drama; he also appears to be a Trump supporter, but we’ll get to that later. Edward apparently has a penchant for meddling in the business, and RCI has had three CEOs in the past decade.
For the past seven years Edward has apparently been involved in “continuous scheming” to meddle in the company executives’ leadership, according to a letter sent by a group of the directors on the RCI board to John Tory. Over seven years!
Recently, this scheming involved chief financial officer Tony Staffieri. At the beginning of 2021, RCI CEO Joe Natale had apparently resolved to replace Staffieri, but he was forced to put those plans on hold in March because RCI moved to buy Shaw Communications, one of the biggest telecom players in western Canada. The total value of the deal is around $26 billion. The deal is being reviewed by various government entities because the telecom sector is heavily regulated and if the deal goes through, it will significantly reduce the number of players in the market.
Less competition will probably lead to higher prices which will be bad for customers, but that’s just me editorializing.
Backstabbing and a butt-dial
So in September, apparently Edward Rogers was scheming with Tony Staffieri to oust CEO Joe Natale and nine other top executives loyal to Natale. Staffieri would replace Natale as CEO.
Natale caught wind of the scheme when Staffieri did a butt-dial, and Natale overheard a conversation between Staffieri and chief legal officer David Miller. This is a company that runs Canada’s largest cell phone network we’re talking about.
So Natale does an end-run around Edward Rogers (who is chair of the board of RCI, and also chair of the family trust that has total voting control over the company, remember.) Natale talks to some other members of the RCI board of directors about the scheme, and an emergency meeting is called for Sunday Sept. 26.
Loretta Rogers, Ted’s widow, along with Melinda Rogers-Hixon, Edward Rogers’s sister and deputy chair of the family trust, both back Joe Natale as CEO.
Tony Staffieri leaves the company three days later when the dust settles.
At the time, Rogers announces the change and you might say “Huh! Weird that the chief financial officer is leaving with zero warning while the company is in the midst of a $26 billion corporate merger!” But none of the backroom games were public yet.
Rogers on Rogers in full public view
On Oct. 8, the Globe and Mail breaks this story open and things start to get messy in public.
Then last week, Edward Rogers starts making moves to dismiss a bunch of RCI board members and try to replace them with people more loyal to him.
On Tuesday evening, and then all day Thursday the family trust advisory committee meet at a law firm in downtown Toronto, with Toronto Mayor John Tory chairing at least one of these meetings to act as mediator.
As an aside, Tory resigned all his other corporate entanglements when he was elected mayor, but he said at the time he would stay on the Rogers family trust because he made a solemn promise to his dead billionaire friend. So for the past seven years he’s been quietly in these meetings while also mayor of Toronto.
Also on Thursday, the RCI board of directors voted to remove Edward Rogers as chairman. This is after apparently they tried some cockamamie scheme to set up a committee to establish “clear protocols” to limit Edward from meddling.
Oh, and for an added bit of ridiculousness, the guy who replaces Edward as chairman of the board just happens to be named John A. MacDonald, because the thing this deeply Canadian clusterfuck needed was an allusion to our country’s genocidal founding prime minister, but I digress.
Also on Thursday, RCI reports its Q3 financial earnings ($490 million in profits in the last three months!) and while speaking to investment analysts, Natale tells them he’s firmly in charge and everything is fine. Natale also issued a press release saying the same kind of thing, so you know he definitely means it.
But on Friday the Globe reports that Natale and most of his executive team are ready to quit en masse if Edward’s board shenanigans are successful.
Edward, who’s still chair of the family trust, but now no longer chair of the RCI board, signs a resolution trying to fire a bunch of board members and replace them with people more loyal to him. John A. responds by saying the resolution is invalid.
Martha Rogers tweeting at 3 a.m.
We are now at a point where it is honestly unclear who exactly is a valid member of the RCI board. And then at 3 a.m. on Saturday morning, Martha Rogers (Edward’s other sister, a “naturopathic doctor” according to her twitter bio) started tweeting. Apparently unable to sleep, she just starts going off.
Let’s read some tweets:
So, there’s a lot to unpack here. She’s accusing Edward Rogers and his cabal of loyalists — including the mayor of Toronto! — of leaking all these messy details as a public pressure tactic. She’s publicly calling on Ed to resign.
References to “Navigator” are the crisis PR and strategy firm that usually winds up in the mix with every major Canadian scandal where there’s a lot of money and powerful people involved. “Navigator must be shitting their pants,” is a line for the ages.
“Succession” and “GoT” obviously refer to the HBO series. And while Martha may fancy herself as the plucky sociopathic magic assassin hero of Game of Thrones, I am sorry but this really is Succession, a story about family infighting among a bunch of insipid children in the shadow of a corporate patriarch.
The Trump thing is fun, though. That’s a reference to the fact that Edward’s wife Suzanne posted pictures of the family down in Mar-a-Lago with Trump.
At the time, Suzanne Rogers downplayed the incident but Jonathan Goldsbie at Canadaland dug up some other social media posts which indicate that our boy Edward is a fan of The Donald.
On Sunday, Martha Rogers took to Twitter again to announce that Edward and the RCI board that he’s appointed will meet at 7pm. Both Martha and RCI say this board meeting is illegitimate.
So that’s where we’re at. Presumably part two will come next weekend when we know where the story goes next.
These are our oligarchs
To be honest, when I started this newsletter a couple months ago, my plan was just to read financial reports and follow business stuff. This article is mostly just a summary of a bunch of reporting by Alexandra Posadzki, along with some details from other news reports and social media.
But if we’re going to talk about the real oligarchs that run Canada, well, this is who they are.
In nearly every statement by everyone involved in this sordid drama, they mention that it’s awful and sad and regrettable that this is playing out in public.
I respectfully disagree.
Take a good hard look. These are the people who run Canada. This is what it’s like behind the curtain, which is why basically every institution in our country spends so much effort controlling the narrative and smothering the flow of information.
As a reminder, the company underneath all of this employs about 24,000 people; owns the Toronto Blue Jays; a bunch of TV and radio stations; and operates one of the most important telecommunications networks in the country.
Oh, and in case you’re tempted to think that this whole stupid situation isn’t emblematic of anything more than one stupid company, I’ll just leave you with this tantalizing detail: The CEO and Executive Chair of Shaw Communications is named Brad Shaw, and yes that means what you think it means.