By 2009, Richard Homburg’s glitzy, buzz-worthy annual office parties had become corporate Halifax’s post-Christmas social hot ticket. Two hundred of the city’s elite investors, investment advisors, developers, lawyers, accountants and assorted corporate hangers-on would gather in the January freeze to mix and mingle at Homburg Citadel, Homburg Invest’s global corporate headquarters. A modern building insinuated into the base of Citadel Hill in the shadow of Halifax’s Town Clock, it has a commanding a view of the downtown banking and financial towers.

“Anyone who was anyone would be there,” recalls Kevin Cox, the then-managing editor and investment columnist at allnovascotia.com, a business web site, who was one of the few journalists to score an invitation. While the catered canapés and well-chosen wines may have been “marvelous,” Cox was more interested in the events’ journalistic possibilities. The receptions usually capped a Homburg Invest board meeting, “and there was always the sense of big things happening.”

The highlight of the evening was invariably Richard Homburg’s… “Ah, I’m not quite sure how to describe them,” admits an investment advisor who was also a regular at the soirées. “I called them Richard Homburg’s ‘state-of-the-world’ speeches.”

After about an hour of socializing, Homburg would take to the microphone and pontificate for anywhere from half an hour to an hour: about governments — local, national, international — about global politics, world economics, interest rates, the investment climate, Asia, Europe, the future... His own publicly traded company was often little more than an aside in these ramblings, but he was always worth listening to, says the investment advisor, “because he wasn’t your typical corporate CEO. He was eccentric and he would say outlandish things.”

And because Richard Homburg was also incredibly successful — a self-made immigrant entrepreneur who headed a $4-billion, Halifax-based global real estate company with assets in Canada, the United States and Europe — people paid attention.

“He wasn’t a name dropper,” adds Cox, “but there was a depth of knowledge and he gave the sense that I know this from the inside. ‘When I was in Austria… When I was in Germany…’ He was very much a world citizen.”

No wonder then that Homburg’s January 2009 ‘state-of-the-world’ address was so eagerly anticipated.

In 2008, the world had gone straight to hell on a runaway train filled with corporate collapses, bank bailouts and murky financial finagling. It was the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, and many traced the knocked-down dominoes of major banks, investment houses, financial institutions and economies to the gigantic whoosh from the belatedly pricked balloon of an insanely out-of-control real estate market.

Real estate, of course, was Richard Homburg’s life. His own businesses had been far from immune to the economic meltdown. Just two months before, Homburg Invest had announced it was pulling out of a $128-million joint venture to buy more than 30 U.S. properties in Ohio, Pennsylvania and New York. Homburg blamed his change of heart on “recent unprecedented financial events [that] have caused the virtual financial collapse of world capital markets.”

Surely, Richard Homburg would have something to say about what had been going on in the world.

He did. The financial system is crumbling, he complained. The banking system is in a mess because of debt. There will be at least two more years of down markets. But… But Homburg Invest was just fine, thank you very much.”Those things are happening to other people,” Cox paraphrases Homburg’s essential argument, “because they’re not as smart as me.”

The investment advisor was aghast. “The world had become a very scary place, but Homburg continued to wear these rose-coloured glasses when it came to his own company. And yet his own company was in exactly the same situation, and he had done nothing to protect it, reduce its debt load. He was always the ultimate salesman, the guy who always had an explanation whenever anything went wrong. The problem was the market stopped buying.”

Shortly after that, the investment advisor stopped recommending Homburg Invest to his clients. He wasn’t the only one.

By November 2011, when the Toronto Stock Exchange finally suspended trading in Homburg Invest, the company’s shares — which had traded as high as $70 a share in 2007 — were worth just 80 cents.

What had gone so wrong so quickly — and why?

***

Richard Homburg’s up-by-the-bootstraps tale, as he’s unfolded it in various interviews over the years, begins in the Netherlands in the aftermath of World War II. The first seminal event in young Richard’s life — his father’s death — happened when he was just four years old. His mother then married a man who didn’t have much hope for his stepson. He told Richard he’d be lucky to end up a garbage collector.

At first, that pessimistic prediction seemed about right. Richard dropped out of school at the age of 12 and began working as a drudge in a local bakery, hefting 50-kg sacks of flour. But he saved his guilders and, perhaps to prove to himself “my stepfather had no control over me,” he invested in his first piece of real estate even before he was of legal age.

By the time he was 20, he had established his own business, an import-export company he optimistically called Homburg International. “The idea,” he explained, “was that I was going to do it more than just in the Netherlands. I dreamed about going to Australia or Canada… I had my mind set that I was going to be successful; I had my mind set about what car I wanted to drive and all the things I wanted to do.”

In 1972 when he was still only 23, Homburg traveled to Nova Scotia to visit relatives. “There was a great beach,” he would recall years later. “I just had a great summer and kept hanging around.” He established a beach-head for his import-export business, then invested his profits in local real estate. At first, he bought low-rent units in Dartmouth’s poor north end but, by 1977, he’d also acquired a firm that built houses and apartments. He leveraged each new property to acquire more — and more prime — real estate. He swallowed up properties — residential, commercial, industrial, empty — in Alberta, British Columbia and the United States, as well as Nova Scotia. In 1991, he took control of Uni-Vest N.V., a publicly traded real estate fund in the Netherlands.

Ten years later, Homburg transformed himself into the chair and CEO of Homburg Invest — a new, publicly traded company incorporated in Alberta, headquartered in Halifax and listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange — in order to gain access to the cash he would need to fund his voracious global real estate appetite. “Unlike many real estate investment companies,” Homburg noted in his first annual report to shareholders, “we will not specialize in one specific type of real estate or one region of the country…. We have set ambitious goals for Homburg Invest Inc. but we believe they are realistic.”

Richard Homburg more than achieved even his most ambitious goals. From just 28 properties with a net value of $89 million in 2001, Homburg Invest’s growth exploded exponentially. In one six-week period in 2005, for example, Homburg Invest closed deals in the Netherlands and Germany worth $1.2 billion. By 2006, Homburg boasted the company had not only joined the “billion dollar club” but “we’re now focused on becoming a company with $8 billion in assets within five to seven years.”

Homburg’s universe did keep unfolding — and expanding — as he said it would. In 2007, the company bought Munich-based Infineon Technologies AG’s newly completed headquarters and business campus for $564 million; began developing 13 new properties in Calgary, including the $376-million Homburg-Harris commercial centre in the heart of downtown Calgary; announced plans to transform CN’s venerable Montreal train station and corporate office tower, which it had acquired for $370 million, into a “multi-use upscale” development; and forked over another $550 million to gobble up the assets of Montreal commercial landlord Alexis Nihon.

In 2007, the company’s year-over-year profit increased by 245 per cent — from $23 million in 2006 to $79.2 million.

By then, Homburg had acquired an $11.2-million corporate jet to ferry him between homes in the Netherlands and Nova Scotia, not to forget corporate offices and investment interests everywhere.

Though the company had become publicly traded, the company was really Richard Homburg. It reflected his passions and quirks. Since Homburg speaks Dutch, German and English, he insisted employees at his foreign holdings had to be multilingual too. After he almost died as the result of an illness, Homburg became a fitness fanatic, installing a gym in the office and pushing his own employees to be more fit.

Homburg also established himself as a major Maritime philanthropist, most notably donating $5 million to Saint Mary’s University in Halifax for construction of the Homburg Centre for Health and Wellness.

And somewhere along the line, he grew to like watches so much he bought a Chinese watch-making company. According to the company’s web site, Homburg “is one of the keenest collectors of exclusive watches with mechanical movements. He loves classical mopeds as well,” the website adds whimsically, but that is quite another story.

Indeed.

And then... the bottom fell out.

“Homburg’s growth plan worked so long as property values increased,” explains the investment advisor. “But he was so highly leveraged that once the markets turned, it became a house of cards.”

“Richard,” sums up Kevin Cox, “lost his magic touch.”

***

Homburg Invest’s slippery downward slide was lightning-greased by global events over which Homburg had no control. His was far from the only company to go bust after over-borrowing during the heady global real estate boom. But there were other factors at play too. And most of them had to do with Richard Homburg. He had “put his name on the door,” as one investor described it to me, and that made him the personification — for good and ill — of his company.

“If you’re a private company you can be low profile,” Homburg once mused. “It’s between you, the tax department and how you feel when you look at yourself in the morning.”

As a publicly traded company, however, there were inevitable, pesky questions about how Homburg — who effectively owned 46 per cent of Homburg Invest and controlled 72.5 per cent of its shares — actually ran the company.

In one prospectus, for example, Homburg Invest says it paid $52.5 million in 2006 to a variety of companies personally controlled by Richard Homburg in return for close to a dozen different “services,” including asset and construction management, property management, even insurance. In 2010, when Homburg Invest decided to roll its Canadian assets into a real estate investment trust, the company agreed to pay Homburg Canada—another Homburg-controlled company— $21.6 million in “termination fees” in addition to the $47 million it had paid for management services the year before. As one investment advisor deadpanned at the time: it was “a move that will raise some eyebrows.”

Although those related transactions were described in company documents, Cox, who regularly examined such corporate governance documents, confesses “Homburg’s spider web was the only one I could never penetrate.” Homburg wasn’t much help. No one but Richard Homburg was allowed to speak for the company and, when he did grant interviews, “they were more of an audience. He expected to be treated with a certain amount of deference.”

“He would have been a brilliant politician,” adds the investment advisor, who also found the Homburg network of inter-related companies impenetrable. “You’d ask a question he didn’t want to answer and he’d talk and talk, go off on five different tangents but he’d never answer your question.”

While no one seemed to fret too much about this lack of transparency when the company was flying high, the questions became more pointed after the company’s fortunes began to crumble.

In April 2010, the Dutch Authority for Financial Markets, a regulatory agency, formally ordered Homburg Invest to provide it with more information regarding a murky tax dispute between Richard Homburg and Dutch authorities.

What was that all about? No one knows for certain, even now, although Cox believes it may have had at least something to do with Homburg’s personal style. “Richard doesn’t take regulatory people seriously. Regulators worry about ‘i’s’ and ‘t’s.’ Richard thinks on a big scale.”

Homburg also clearly still continued to think “big” when it came to his company’s future — even after its future seemed all in its past.

“Homburg hammered in ‘08,” screamed a Halifax Herald headline over a report on Homburg’s $96 million loss in 2008. Four months later, Homburg had to tell shareholders — whose once-$70 shares were now worth less than $10 — they would receive no dividend that year. The next year, share values plummeted another four dollars.

Despite all that, Homburg suggested, Pollyanna-like, to one unhappy investor at the company’s 2010 annual meeting that she buy even more Homburg stock now that it was cheaper.

In the midst of all this corporate turmoil, Homburg also continued to play his larger-than-life role as generous philanthropist. In July 2009, he announced he was personally donating $2 million to Charlottetown’s Fathers of Confederation Building Trust — in part to build a pedway to link the Confederation Centre of the Arts to his new downtown hotel project but also to get his name over the entrance to the centre’s iconic mainstage, where Anne of Green Gables has delighted audiences for generations.

Homburg’s corporate stage management didn’t go nearly as well. In June 2009, he announced plans to restructure the company by spinning off its real estate assets into five new entities, including Homburg Canada Real Estate Investment Trust, which Homburg would describe as “one of Canada’s largest and best quality” REITs.

While selling Homburg Invest assets to the REIT did help reduce its crushing debt, it also, in the process, hived off many of the company’s best property assets, making Homburg Invest itself an even less attractive investment.

In March 2011 — just a month before the Dutch financial regulator, who’d been raising corporate governance alarms for a year, formally ordered Homburg Invest to remove its boss and largest shareholder as a company “decision-maker” — Homburg preemptively announced he would be stepping down as chair and CEO to “focus on a privately-owned global real estate venture.”

A month later, Homburg unexpectedly offered to buy up all the outstanding shares in Homburg Invest and take it private, a ploy that would have put it, and Homburg himself, beyond the clutches of Dutch regulators.

But that plan quickly died when key investors, including Clearwater’s John Risley, dismissed the $3.25 a share offer as “way too low” and raised pointed questions about the company’s lack of transparency.

After that, what had become a tangled mess got even more so. Relations between Homburg and those he’d put in charge when he left deteriorated. There were accusations and counter-accusations, lawsuits, name changes (Homburg Canada REIT became Camarc REIT in order to “put some distance between itself and troubled Homburg Invest,” and then was promptly taken over by a competitor).

Finally, on September 9, 2011, a battered Homburg Invest, no longer on good terms with its major shareholder, applied for creditor protection in order to try to restructure. It made the move, in part, to “address the primary concerns” of the Netherlands Authority for Financial Markets, which was threatening to revoke the company’s investment licence. It eventually did so anyway.

By October, the company’s court-appointed monitor reported Homburg Invest had debts of $2 billion. Its assets, which had topped $600 million at the end of 2008, were now worth just $57 million. By that point, the Toronto Stock Exchange had already halted trading in shares of Homburg Invest and initiated a review to determine if the stock should be de-listed.

The rapid rise and faster fall of Richard Homburg seemed complete.

It was over… Or is it?

***

The qualities that brought Richard Homburg to the top of his entrepreneurial game — vaulting ambition, obsessive passion, massive ego and the kind of pride that goes before a fall — are also, of course, what brought him crashing to earth. They are, in fact, the essential qualities of any successful entrepreneur.

Richard Homburg is still only in his early sixties. He’s not without assets. In early January, a Montreal court approved the terms of a deal to settle a lawsuit between Homburg Invest and its former CEO that gives Richard Homburg $10.5 million in cash, $7.1 million in promissory notes and title to two condos valued at $3.1 million. No one believes he’ll end up in a food bank anytime soon — and his wounded ego will almost certainly ache for vindication.

When I ask the investment advisor whether Homburg can make a comeback, he is initially dismissive. “He’s essentially done,” he says. “The whole thing has become too much of a soap opera.” But then he pauses, considers. “Richard has always worn those rose-coloured glasses. He’ll probably look at this and say, this is just the way the world works. Shit happens. And he’ll move on. Who knows?”

The little Dutch boy, who used the ache of a dismissive step-father to stoke his overweening ambitions, has not disappeared.

We may not have heard the last of Richard Homburg.

___

A note on sources:
Since Richard Homburg didn’t respond to my requests for an interview, I’ve had to draw on other sources for this article. Most of the biographical information about him originally appeared in two excellent profiles, one by Canadian Press reporter Michael Tutton, the other in the defunct Halifax Daily News, both published at the pinnacle of Homburg’s success. The best day-to-day coverage of Homburg’s corporate comings and goings appeared on the Halifax-based website allnovascotia.com. And, of course, I talked extensively with people who know Homburg and his companies intimately: associates, investors, investment advisors and developers, none of whom would be quoted directly in the article.

It’s time to make transit an essential service.

By that, I don’t—necessarily—mean it’s time to take away bus drivers’ right to strike.

What I do mean is that, however the current labour dispute ends, it’s long past time city council made transit a can’t-live-without service. And not just for those who, because they can’t afford the alternatives, must wait for the bus that doesn’t run when they need it, or doesn’t go where they’re going, or...

Let’s start by banning parking in downtown Halifax, say from Duke Street to Spring Garden, and from the harbour to Citadel Hill. Then couple that with an efficient shuttle service to zip people around within the urban core.

With no parking and less traffic, we could free up space for bike lanes, sidewalk patios and more street-level activities, encouraging a level of urban density that would finally make downtown a living, liveable community.

Next, let’s ribbon the peninsula with bus-only through streets. How about Agricola or Robie running north-south? And Quinpool-Cogswell-Duke or Chebucto-Cornwallis heading east-west.

Such a subway-that-isn’t-quite could feed into bus-only lanes on all the key roadways and bridges leading in and out of the peninsula in the north and west.

To complement that,how about an efficient, high-speed ferry network to transform our magnificent harbour into a way to link rather than divide us. Much like Sydney, Australia, does with its iconic ferry service, ferries would make it easy—even pleasurable—for commuters to travel between downtown Halifax and Dartmouth, Bedford, Burnside, Hammonds Plains, Westphal, even Herring Cove.

Not to forget the possibilities light rail offers from the farther suburbs to downtown.

I know, I know. I’m dreaming. But there are ways—a congestion tax on automobile traffic across the bridges, tacking tolls on major highways—to help fund versions of this.

At a time when gas prices are spiking and carbon emissions are choking the environment, such ideas are far from as far fetched as they may seem.

The upcoming Kelly-free municipal election offers us an opportunity to talk about our future.

Let’s not waste it.

Peter Kelly’s final mayoralty meltdown announcement last week was not triggered by any of the many mis-governance issues that should have long since ended his political career. Ironically, the mayor was ultimately hoist on the petard of his own sloppy-and-perhaps-worse handling of the estate of a friend, a private matter unrelated to his duties as mayor.

It is tempting at moments like these—this “after-27-years-of-public-service-I-have-made-my-contribution-to-the-good-of-the-community-to-the-very-best-of-my-ability-and-it-is-time-to-seek-new-horizons” moment—to seek to be kind too, to acknowledge the toll public service takes on a politician’s personal life.

It does. But how many times in his own eye-darting, stand-up, self-serving, stick-to-the-talking-points farewell interviews did the mayor do it for us: endlessly lamenting the marriage lost, the 90-hour weeks, the nights sleeping on the office floor?

It is tempting too to glorify any soon-to-be-gone politician’s accomplishments.

There were a few: Kelly’s genuine public apology for the wrongs of Africville, for example, is praiseworthy, as was his success in piloting the harbour solutions sewage treatment project to completion, HRM By Design, the Canada Games, the skating oval, the…

But, after 12 years—for a man who will leave office this fall as Halifax’s longest serving mayor ever—that list is woefully short.

The other side of his ledger is much longer and more damning: the botched Commonwealth Games bid, the concert-gate scandal, the lack of a business case for a new convention centre, the mindless, my-city-is-better-than-Moncton push for a new stadium, the violations of HRM By Design, the St. Pat’s school sale fiasco, the endless cat bylaw debates, the dysfunctional council meetings, the secrecy about everything, the refusal to take responsibility for anything…

Perhaps Peter Kelly’s greatest contribution to the future of our city will ultimately have been his decision not to re-offer.

We no longer have to have a referendum on his record.

We can begin to have the conversation about our future.

It’s time.

With 760 bus drivers walking picket lines, 130 brewery workers on the edge of lockout, 870 professors voting to strike and 3,800 health care workers heading for conciliation, it’s no surprise news that 36 provincial court judges have a new three-year deal with the province passed almost entirely unnoticed.

Judges don’t actually negotiate their salaries. That would be unseemly. An association speaks for them—sort of a union, but with a gentler sounding name and less formal power. Who needs formal power when you’re speaking for judges?

Judges can’t strike. A three-member tribunal hears submissions from their association, the government and anyone else who cares to comment. The tribunal considers those arguments and then decides. Binding arbitration, if you will, but without the baggage.

The ostensible reason for all this non-negotiating negotiating is to “maintain the independence of the judiciary,” so they can’t be “corrupted by the temptation to curry favour among certain litigants in order to gain financial advantage.”

Judges, of course, have mortgages, families, needs and wants. Not to mention jealousies that judges in other jurisdictions get more than they do. Their issues aren’t that different from us lesser mortals. Salaries, pensions, perks.

So how did the judges do?

Not badly. During the past 10 years, in fact, provincial court judges’ salaries in Nova Scotia increased from $144,000 to $207,577.

And, while the province is committed to holding the line at one per cent for other public servants, the tribunal decided judges needed three per cent. New salary: $214,000.

Pensions? The tribunal decided the public service pension plan, which caps indexing for everyone else at 1.25 per cent, isn’t sweet enough. Judges’ pensions—paid out of the same pot—will be indexed at 75 per cent of the consumer price index to a maximum of five per cent.

I’m not quibbling with the specifics.

But I would note that three per cent of a judge’s salary adds up to close to $7,000 more a year, while one per cent of the average Nova Scotian’s salary—$39,500—totals less than $400 a year.

The gap between those who have and those who don’t grows. Still. Again.

So let me see if I have this right.

When workers are at their most vulnerable—when, for example, they’ve decided to join a union and are attempting to negotiate a first contract with a more powerful, perhaps hostile employer—Jamie Baillie is a champion of free collective bargaining. Let the chips fall where they may… so long as they fall the way of Michelin and Sobeys.

On the other hand, when workers have some leverage—when, to pick another example out of the ether, transit workers vote 98.4 per cent to stop driving their buses to put pressure on the employer to negotiate better terms—Jamie Baillie thinks collective bargaining is a crock and wants the premier to legislate them back to work. Immediately.

At least the Tory leader is consistent in his inconsistency.

Jamie Baillie

When given the choice, Baillie will inevitably come down on the side of the over-dog.

Baillie doesn’t put it that way, of course. “I’m a believer in collective bargaining,” he declared disingenuously Friday.

Baillie’s idea of collective bargaining? The premier should lock both sides in his office, “tell them they’ve got 12 hours to work out their differences and if they’re not able to do so, then he’ll settle it himself.”

How would Baillie settle it? While he doesn’t offer specifics—three guesses on which side he would pick as premier—Baillie did say he wants the province to consider declaring transit an essential service so future collective bargaining could be rendered meaningless.

He’s a “believer” all right.

I will confess I’m not sure who’s right and who’s wrong in the current strike—or if the answer to that question can be one or the other.

But I do know both sides are under enormous pressure to find a settlement. Union members face the daunting prospect of buying groceries and paying mortgages on meagre strike pay. Management has to know that if the strike drags on it risks a permanent loss of riders to carpooling, biking and walking.

There may come a time when legislation is necessary. But not yet. Let the two sides bargain collectively. Without meddling from “believers” like Baillie.
 

Sobeys this week made what the business website allnovascotia.com called a "shock announcement." Its CEO Bill McEwan will be stepping down this spring for unspecified "health" reasons.

Back in 2003, shortly after he assumed the reigns of the Nova Scotia-based supermarket giant, I wrote this profile of McEwan for the Globe and Mail's Report on Business Magazine.

Bill McEwan is like a kid in a candy shop. His candy shop. “Stand here,” he tells me, pointing to a spot just inside the entrance of this airy, modern, less-than-year-old Sobeys supermarket in Vaughan, a fast-growing suburban community north of Toronto. “We call this the vista.” His arm sweeps across the store from right to left. “A customer should be able to see every department in the store from this one spot.” More...