By the early and mid 2000’s Michael Lathigee had made a lot of money for investors and carried this momentum into building the largest investment club in North America with over 100 million in assets.
He ‘positioned’ his organization when oil was under $20 a barrel, when gold was hovering at $300 an ounce and uranium was under $10 a pound (eventually uranium went to over $100 a pound)
Prior to the credit crisis of ’08 / ’09 he ‘positioned’ in Real Estate and became heavily leveraged in the process of doing several large development projects in Edmonton, Alberta – on behalf of himself and many investors
During those months Michael kept in close contact with his member / investors – and did a 13 city tour to update investors during that time
His message “In Canada, unlike the United States, we did not have “no doc loans” or “negative amortization loans” and Canadian lending practices are much more conservative and therefore we will not see the impact of the credit crisis as sharply in Canada and for that reason we feel comfortable to continue our development projects in Edmonton.”
All indicators during those days early were such that this position was sound
He called it wrong! And the crisis deepened.
And then events overtook the projects
Within 30 days of Lehman Bros collapsing, TD Bank called a $20 million dollar line of credit with Michael’s company even though all payments were current.
This was an incredibly heavy handed and even (arguably) unethical decision by the TD Bank
On the youtube video titled ‘Michael Lathigee writes letter of complaint to TD Bank’ – Mike lays out the way in which TD Bank handled itself in those days.
As the ‘meltdown’ progressed land prices in Edmonton collapsed in the ensuing months – by more than 30% and all land lots orders that were sold to builders in the Edmonton, Alberta real estate developments saw bank financing cancelled.
Tens of millions in booked profits evaporated.
Many investors (including Michael who was heavily invested) were hurt
Out of this the BC Securities Commission lawyers made a civil fraud finding against him for what they defined as ‘lack of risk disclosure’.
As you can see from this video he discusses this BC Security Commission Ruling very publicly and in fact has mentioned it in almost every public presentation that he gives.
He is candid about the circumstances and discusses the history and outcome without hesitation and encourages any and all to research him on google and ask questions.
Michael disagrees with penalty assessed against him and is appealing the decision.