THE DOWNFALL OF PETER POCKLINGTON

The first time I ever met this man was when in 1983. Pocklington entered the Progressive Conservative Party of Canada leadership convention. He campaigned on a platform of free trade with the United States, privatizing government-owned Crown corporations like Air Canada, Petro-Canada and Canadian National Railway, retiring the national debt and implementing a flat tax. In the end, Pocklington fell far below his expectations of supporting delegates despite him  actually coming  close to receiving 102 delegates. However, he withdrew his candidacy before the second ballot and supported the eventual winner who was then Brian Mulroney, who would adopt some of Pocklington's policies while he was in government.

Pocklington seems to always be in trouble of some sort or other.  I met him in a hotel room in a hotel next to the Maple Gardens where the convention was being held. At that time, I was a professional process server and I had been instructed to serve him with a court document. I don’t know who was suing him or why but the claim was for several million dollars from what I can recall.

When I reached the door of the large room where I was told he would be in, I didn’t see him as there was a large number of people in the room. I asked someone if he could tell Pocklington that there was someone at the door to meet with him.

Pocklington came to the door and I asked him if he was Peter Pocklington. He asked me why I wanted to know. I told him that I had an envelope to give to him. He admitted that he was Peter Pocklington. I handed him the court document which I had previously placed in a large envelope.

He opened the envelope and realized that he had just been served with a court document. He immediately said, “I’m sorry but I am not Peter Pocklington.”

I smiled and said in return, “I was told by my employer that I would be able to identify you as soon as I saw you.”

He asked, “And how did you identify me as Peter Pocklington?”

I replied with a big smile, “My employer told me to look for the biggest asshole in the room and I would spot you right away.  You are obviously the biggest asshole in this room and that is why I spotted you right away.”  

The last thing he wanted to do was attack me as it would become public so he simply slammed the door in my face.

He was born on November 18^th 1941 (I was  eight then) and later  he became a Canadian entrepreneur and vocal advocate of free-market  capitalism.

One of his earliest business ventures was to find old cars on the farms around his maternal grandparents' home in Carberry, Manitoba, buy them for $25, then ship them to Ontario by train, where he sold them for upwards of $500. Because of the West's dry, cold climate, the cars, many of them 25 to 40 years old, were in better shape than comparable vehicles that had been driven on Ontario's salted roads.

By the time Pocklington was 25, he owned his first car dealership, Westown Ford in Tilbury, Ontario. At the time, he was the youngest Ford dealer in Canada. Within a few years he had sold the Tilbury dealership and bought another in nearby Chatham. By 1971, when Pocklington was only 29, he left Ontario and moved west, where he bought Shirley Ford in Edmonton, Alberta. Within a few years, Pocklington was running the most successful Ford dealership in Canada. He also had the cash flow to buy Edmonton's fledgling team in the World Hockey Association.      

However, he first earned his place in the consciousness of North American sports fans as Peter Puck —the maverick Entrepreneur from oil-rich Alberta who made millions, employed thousands, bucked the political establishment, was the hostage in a famous kidnapping and, most prominently of all, known as the owner of the National Hockey League's Edmonton Oilers during the time when they were one of the best and most dominant teams in the league. Pocklington is perhaps best known as the owner of the Oilers and as the man who traded the rights to hockey's greatest player, Wayne Gretzky, to the Los Angeles Kings.

The Canadian city of Edmonton in the 1970s was experiencing explosive growth fuelled by an oil boom and several fortunes were made, not only by Pocklington but by the likes of Pat Bowlen, later owner of the NFL's Denver Broncos. Pocklington’s business empire eventually exceeded $2 billion in sales. massive real estate holdings throughout Alberta and Ontario; Fidelity Trust, one of Canada’s largest trust companies; Palm Dairies, one of the largest retailers of dairy products in Western Canada; Cambra Foods, a canola manufacturer; Magic Pantry, which sold prepared foods that did not require refrigeration; Kretschmar Foods, which serviced restaurants; Green Acre Farms, a chicken-processing company with plants in Texas and Mississippi; and Gainers, an Edmonton-based beef- and pork-packing company.                 

Certainly no one could say that he wasn’t a smart businessman.

He was also taken hostage by a gunman who broke into his home. "I thought I was bullet-proof — until I was shot," Pocklington told his biographers. The kidnapper was caught and Pocklington made a full recovery.

Petrovic's plan was to kidnap Eva Pocklington, but she escaped. The other two people in the house were released, leaving Pocklington, who was with the gunman for 11 hours while he negotiated a $2-million ransom. However, before the ransom could be paid, police slipped into the house unseen and shot both Petrovic and Pocklington, wounding both men. They each made a full recovery and Petrovic served five years in an Alberta prison before he was released and returned to Yugoslavia.

Pocklington was an active philanthropist for many years in Edmonton. Among his gifts: $1.5 million he helped raise for the Canadian Cystic Fibrosis Foundation; $1 million for the Jamie Platz YMCA; $300,000 for the Glen Sather Sports Medicine Clinic at the University of Alberta; $250,000 to establish a free-enterprise chair at the University of Alberta's School of Business; and upwards of $2 million for Junior Achievement. It was through his charitable works he became close friends with famed tenor Luciano Pavarotti, former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher, and former U.S. presidents Gerald Ford and George H.W. Bush. . From 1995-2010 Pocklington served as a member of the board for the Betty Ford Center.  He was building up a fine reputation for himself at this point in his life.

In 1998, Pocklington moved to the U.S. with his wife Eva, and settled in Palm Desert, California. He remained active in business and philanthropic pursuits there.

While Pocklington remains a controversial figure in Canada because of the Gretzky trade, he has his fans, too. On October 8, 2014, Pocklington was invited back to Edmonton when the Oilers organized a 30-year reunion of their first Stanley Cup championship team. When he was introduced, the man known as Peter Puck received a standing ovation from the 17,000 fans in attendance.

While Pocklington's business empire realized its successes, it suffered its failures, too. Prime interest rates in the early 1980s topped out at 18.5 per cent, a development that sapped the oil boom of its strength, collapsed the real estate market and sank Fidelity Trust in a sea of declining property values.

But perhaps Pocklington's most notorious setback was the result of a six-month strike that crippled Gainers, which at the time was Canada's second largest meat packer. Pocklington used non-union labour, primarily from Quebec, to keep the plant operating despite the picket lines, a decision that earned him the enmity of Canada's labour movement. Eventually, he agreed to settle the strike and rehire the striking workers at the request of the Alberta government. In return, says Pocklington in his biography, the Alberta premier of the day, Don Getty, agreed to give Gainers an interest-free loan for $50 million. Gainers would give the province 10 per cent of its operating profit every year for the next four years, and repay a conventional mortgage after that. Pocklington also insisted the province disband its pork marketing board, which fixed prices on pork at a rate higher than what the meat packers could sell it in the marketplace. Instead, the government gave Gainers $55 million at 10.5 per cent interest, and didn't get rid of the marketing board. "They said, 'Take it or leave it,' " Pocklington told his biographers. Crippled with a debt-servicing cost it did not anticipate and handicapped by inflated production costs created by the marketing board, Gainers immediately began to drown in a sea of red ink. Loan repayments were missed and within three years, the Alberta government took over Gainers. The province lost $89 million on the venture in the four years it operated Gainers that was more than double the rate of loss in Pocklington's last few years at the helm  and eventually sold the company for 1/20th of the price Pocklington paid for it 11 years earlier.

By the late 1980s, success was also killing the Edmonton Oilers. Players' salaries began to skyrocket, and Gretzky was traded in large part because Pocklington had come to realize he would not be able to keep his star player and would lose him to free agency. More players were parceled off as their salary expectations exceeded the team's ability to pay Paul Coffey, Mark Messier, Jari Kurri, Glenn Anderson, Kevin Lowe and Grant Fuhr.

By the mid-1990s, the Oilers were still losing money and Pocklington expressed an unwillingness to use his other businesses to bankroll his hockey team. He publicly threatened to move the team in which Hamilton and Minneapolis were among the destinations contemplated however Pocklington never made good on the threats. He was committed to keeping the team in Edmonton and used the possibility of a move to gain improvements to the arena where they played.

Pocklington operated the team on a line of credit, paying 19-per-cent interest to the Alberta Treasury Branches. He asked the ATB to convert the outstanding amount, about $120 million into a conventional mortgage he could pay down. The ATB refused, and instead called his loan. His remaining business empire was sold off piece by piece, including the Oilers and Trappers and Cambra Foods. "Losing the Oilers was like having my heart torn out," Pocklington told his biographers.

Pocklington invested in several businesses in the U.S., including the nutraceutical maker Naturade, and golf club manufacturers Golf Gear and Sonartec. However, those investments yielded more heartache than profit, and what he claims was fiduciary malfeasance by some partners in these ventures left Pocklington the target of numerous lawsuits. In the summer of 2008, one of those suits resulted in raids by U.S. Marshals of the Pocklington home in Indian Wells, California, where a number of items belonging to his wife, including gowns, shoes and purses, as well as Andy Warhol prints of Mick Jagger, were seized. These were eventually returned to her.

In the prior events leading up to Peter Pocklington's exoneration and vindication for the improper extension of probation, a California judge failed to provide a warrant before the expiration of the probationary period.^[  “The Probation Office was crystal clear about the absence of anything resembling probable cause,” wrote Judge Margaret McKeown.

The court had earlier heard evidence that Pocklington had, over a 19-month period, failed to disclose consulting fees paid to a company controlled by his wife. Pocklington argued that was not the case, that all income was reported through tax returns and bank statements. Nevertheless, California District Court Judge Virginia A. Phillips gave Pocklington until Dec. 9, 2013, to report to prison.

On December 6, 2013, the CBC reported that Pocklington would appeal his sentence, had been released on $100,000 bail and would not be reporting to prison as ordered.

On July 3, 2015, the Toronto Sun reported that the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals had reversed the ruling. In vacating Judge Phillips' original order, “The district court lacked jurisdiction to extend Pocklington’s probation beyond its October 26, 2012, expiration date,” the appeal court panel said in a written ruling.

In April 2012, investigators with the Arizona Corporation Commission alleged Pocklington and an associate, John McNeil, had engaged in securities fraud related to Crystal Pistol Resources LLC and Liberty Bell Resources 1, LLC. Pocklington vigorously denied the allegations, insisted he and McNeil had done nothing wrong, and that investors in the mining venture were not being misled. The geologists associated with the project were, according to the mining company newsletter, also vigorously defending their data. Those geologists “boast impeccable reputations and have been conscientious and thorough in their testing,” Pocklington wrote in a letter to the Edmonton Journal. “We do not tell our investors anything their data is not telling us.”

On June 4, 2013, a decision rendered by the Arizona Corporations Commission ordered the respondents to pay the commission $5,149,316, and an administrative penalty for $100,000. The Commission would disburse the funds on a pro-rata basis to investors. A statement by Pocklington's company was included in Canadian media accounts, which stated “the allegations of wrongdoing have been laid to rest” with the commission’s decision. “We have done nothing wrong,” Pocklington said in the release. “We have worked diligently and honestly with all of our investors and have been conscientious in guiding the company through the necessary regulatory frameworks. We are committed to raising capital in accordance with existing rules and regulations.” He added that any errors were “born of inexperience and naivete, not malice or avarice,” and were quickly rectified. On December 6, 2013, a report by the CBC  stated that the $5,149,316 fine remained unpaid. His investors didn’t get their money back as the Commission had hoped.

At the time of the publication of this article, Peter Pocklington faces new securities charges in the United States.   

 

 

The Securities  and  Exchange Commission in the United  States has charged  Pocklington and  others  with respect to his so-called medical device company  with  defrauding investors  by hiding his previous charges to them  and misappropriating investor funds. The SEC notes that he pleaded guilty to a federal felony perjury charge and was later ordered to pay te monies back which he did not do.

I am not surprised that he perjured himself considering that he also lied to me when he denied he was Peter Pocklington.

I have no idea as to what is going to happen to him next but he may ended up be kicked out of the United States if he is convicted  again of wrongdoings. Unfortunately, this dishonest asshole could end up back in Canada. We need him in Canada like we need the plague.

When I learn what his sentence will be, I will UPDATE this article.