The Mill by Joan Baxter

Author:Joan Baxter
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pottersfield Press

14

New owner, new government, new favours: take two (2011-2017)

Excellence is not just our goal. It’s our method of getting there.

– Paper Excellence Group513

The sale of the Northern Pulp mill and its assets in 2011 attracted surprisingly little public attention in Nova Scotia, considering that during the previous two years it had received more than $90 million in loans and grants from the provincial government, and $28.1 million from the federal government.

The relative lack of media and public reaction to the mill’s purchase is also surprising given the identity of the buyer. A company called Paper Excellence Canada Holdings, with its headquarters in Richmond, British Columbia, had been on a buying binge of pulp and paper mills in Canada.514 By 2012, Paper Excellence owned five pulp mills across the country, including Meadow Lake and Prince Albert in Saskatchewan, MacKenzie Softwood and Howe Sound in British Columbia, and Northern Pulp in Nova Scotia.515 By 2017, Paper Excellence had added two more mills to its Canadian portfolio, in Skookumchuck and Chetwynd in British Columbia.516

So who owned Paper Excellence Canada Holdings that now owned the mill at Abercrombie Point? That, it turns out, is not an easy question to answer. Its deputy CEO, Pedro Chang, claimed it was owned 100 percent by Jackson Widjaja.517 He is the son of Teguh Widjaja, chair of the giant Sinar Mas Group, which owns Asia Pulp & Paper (APP). And Teguh Widjaja, in turn, is the oldest son of the Indonesian billionaire Eka Tjipta Widjaja.

In 2015, the normally “media-shy” Paper Excellence agreed to an interview with Business Vancouver, and deputy CEO Chang said that while there is a family connection between his company and the Sinar Mas group and APP, Paper Excellence Canada is not a subsidiary of either company.518 Nevertheless, an investigation done for Greenpeace in The Netherlands shows a complex corporate web of companies that does link the Widjaja family in Indonesia with Paper Excellence Canada Holdings and its pulp and paper mills in Canada.519

Since 2007, the APP group had been on a global shopping spree, expanding its pulp and paper interests not just in North America but also in Asia, Australia, and Europe.520 It set up a holding company called Paper Excellence B.V. in The Netherlands, allegedly “because of the attractive Dutch tax climate,” and established a family of subsidiaries that purchased mills in Canada, France, and Germany.521 Paper Excellence also became the owner of paper marketing companies in Australia, Europe, and Japan.

Another Dutch corporate group, which includes Bentoning Holdings and two subsidiaries, in turn financed the subsidiaries of Paper Excellence to purchase the pulp mills. The authors of the study for Greenpeace, Jan Willem van Gelder and Petra Spaargaren, tried to burrow into the rabbit hole to map the complex warren of corporate ownership, but were unable to identify the owners of Bentoning. They concluded that “the ownership of Paper Excellence (B.V.) is hidden behind a string of foreign holding companies in Malaysia and the British Virgin Islands” and that it was “very likely” both were ultimately owned by the Widjaja family.

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