Crocus, ‘Company A,’ and controversy

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This article was published 22/10/2005 (7507 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

MAPLE Leaf Distillers was headed to the big leagues. It was Dec. 21, 2001, and David Wolinsky and Costas Ataliotis, controlling shareholders of Maple Leaf, held court in the Manitoba Legislative Building to announce a $6.4-million expansion and a partnership with Pernod Ricard, one of the worldís largest wine and spirit companies.

Ataliotis, a tall, Cyprus-born businessman who described himself as an “international entrepreneur,” addressed a who’s who audience that included Premier Gary Doer and then-Winnipeg Mayor Glen Murray. Tables full of Maple Leaf spirits and liqueurs filled a lavish committee room in the Legislative Building. A “world-champion” bartender from Las Vegas juggled bottles and cocktail shakers as still and video cameras swarmed the room.

The Pernod Ricard deal, Ataliotis announced, would boost Maple Leaf revenues from about $5 million to more than $50 million annually in just 18 months, making the upstart Winnipeg company the largest Canadian- owned distillery in Canada. “We’ll be on an international plateau in recognition,” Ataliotis said.

Of all those gathered at the news conference, no one could be prouder than James Umlah. The charismatic chief investment officer of the Crocus Investment Fund had just a year earlier recommended a $1-million investment in Maple Leaf, a two-year-old company operating out of a nondescript warehouse on McPhillips Street.

Umlah confirmed at the news conference that Crocus would follow its initial investment with another $1.8 million to help with the expansion. He confidently told reporters that Maple Leaf was now one of the jewels of the Crocus portfolio. ìI would anticipate further investments (from Crocus), Umlah told reporters.

OVER the next three years, Umlah’s prediction about Maple Leaf and Crocus would turn out to be half right. Crocus would invest more money — millions more. But by September 2004, as Umlah was preparing to leave Crocus, Maple Leaf was no longer being singled out as one of the fund’s success stories. Instead, the brash company with international aspirations was suffering from heavy debt and unfulfilled expectations of growth. In May, Crocus wrote down significantly the value of the Maple Leaf investment.

With Umlah keeping close watch over Maple Leaf, millions of dollars were spent by Ataliotis and Wolinsky on aggressive business ventures that never came to fruition. This included the highly publicized Pernod Ricard deal, which ended in a legal dispute within one year. A national accounting firm resigned in 2004 from its position as company auditor, citing a lack of timely financial reporting and internal controls. And predictions by Wolinsky and Ataliotis about Maple Leaf’s income and contracts were not borne out by the companyís actual performance.

True to his December 2001 prediction, Umlah recommended to the Crocus board more money be invested in Maple Leaf. After the first two investments worth $2.8 million, Crocus invested in Maple Leaf numerous times on Umlahís recommendations. By the fall of 2004, Crocus had provided the distillery with $8.4 million in cash and loan guarantees.

Crocus ceased trading in December 2004 and shortly thereafter announced a $46-million writedown in its investment portfolio. The fund was put into receivership in June. The Maple Leaf investment was not the largest in the Crocus portfolio. But sources familiar with the Maple Leaf- Crocus partnership believe Umlah’s continued support of the struggling distiller in the face of mounting evidence of financial trouble strikes deep at the heart of the Crocus debacle.

Auditor General Jon Singleton, who released a damning report on the Crocus Investment Fund last May, did not identify any of the investee companies by name. One of the key companies examined by Singleton was referred to in his report as “Company A.”

Ataliotis and Wolinsky do not agree that Maple Leaf is Company A. “It’s not us,” Ataliotis said in an interview. However, a Free Press investigation has concluded “Company A.”

in Singletonís report is Maple Leaf Distillers.

Following the release of his report, Singleton asked then-deputy attorney general Bruce Mac- Farlane to consider an investigation of the Crocus fund for possible breaches of the Criminal Code, including fraud, filing a false prospectus and counselling someone to commit a crime.

Singleton confirmed that Crocus involvement in two companies – Companies A and D – was also referred to MacFarlane for investigation. Singleton said the reference to the deputy attorney general was based on evidence uncovered in his investigation which “raised questions of impropriety” related to Companies A and D.

An independent prosecutor appointed by the province examined Singletonís findings and recommended the RCMP be called in to investigate. MacFarlane said Singleton’s findings will be the “starting point” for the RCMP investigation, but that the Mounties will go where the evidence takes them. The RCMP recently asked a courtappointed receiver to turn over all internal records at Crocus.

In his report, Singleton alleges there were “significant deficiencies” with the Company A investment and Umlah was “both dismissive and manipulative” of staff who cautioned him about making further investments. Singleton says Umlah did not fully disclose the financial problems at Company A to the Crocus board, which ultimately approved the follow-on investments.

Singleton says he found several memos from Crocus investment department staff cautioning Umlah about making further investments in Company A. The memos, which Singleton alleges were generally dismissed by Umlah, described a company that was spending at an alarming rate without a clear idea of where it was going.

“The Investment Department staff member said it best,” Singleton says in his report. ìThe investment in Company A was &eulm;out of controlí and apparently in every possible way.

In an October 12 interview, his first since Crocus was taken off the market, Umlah said Singleton does not understand the “vagaries” of the venture capital world and as a result, he has misrepresented events at the fund and the value of individual investee companies.

“You just canít cut and run in private equity, or you blow up your shareholder value,” Umlah said. “You have to be articulate, intelligent and creative in how you keep a company alive and not assuming more risk. That was done every single time here.”

ASK people about James Umlah, and theyíll tell you about the socks. Vividly coloured with unusual patterns, Umlah made a practice of telling people that his extravagant socks, and ties that matched the socks in sartorial splendour, were his “trademark.”

The sock trademark began, Umlah said, in the 1980s while he toiled for a stodgy Bay Street brokerage in Toronto. The dress code required brokers to wear, of all things, knee-high socks. A self-admitted free spirit, Umlah said he pushed the dress code by wearing the most outrageous socks he could find.

The Umlah persona didn’t end with socks and ties. The stockbroker-turned-investment-fundmanager had a well-known affinity for luxury cars, a year-round tan and a compulsive devotion to marathon running. To those who met him, Umlah remains a bigger-than-life character who, in many ways, was just the kind of dynamic, gregarious personality the Crocus Investment Fund needed to get off the ground.

When Crocus CEO Sherman Kreiner offered Umlah a job in October 1992, he was in many ways saving the former stockbroker from three of the longest and leanest years of his life.

Umlah spent most of the 1980s pulling down a six-figure salary at several well-established brokerages. In 1989, however, Umlah left the comfort of an established firm and went out on his own, working as a consultant and trying to match entrepreneurs with capital. “I wasn’t making the same income,” Umlah said.

Court records filed in a 1993 divorce proceeding show Umlah was being pursued for nearly $20,000 in unpaid credit card charges, utility bills, legal fees and hotel expenses. Dean Witter, a national brokerage, also took him to court to recoup a $12,500 membership share in the St. Charles Country Club which, the company claimed, was to be repaid once Umlah left. (In court documents, Umlah denied any such agreement was in place.)

Umlah’s professional reputation had also suffered a black eye. In 1990, Umlah was fined $2,000 by the Investment Dealers Association of Canada for making trades on a clientís account without authorization while working at the Winnipeg office of Wood Gundy Inc. in 1987.

In 1992, Umlah, then 34, took over the reins of Crocus Capital Ltd., the sales and marketing arm of the fund. Trading on the handsome income tax credits provided by the federal and provincial governments, Crocus subscriptions grew exponentially under Umlah’s guidance. “In the first seven, eight years of the Crocus Fund, we were leaders in our class,” Umlah said in a recent interview.

Crocus started in 1993 with an opening share price of $10 and assets of $2 million. By 2002, the pinnacle of Crocusís success, more than 34,000 Manitobans bought into the labour-sponsored venture capital fund, share prices had grown to more than $15 and assets topped $174 million. By that time, Umlah had been promoted to chief investment officer and was earning a $240,000 annual salary.

The principals of investee companies recall Umlah as a steadying influence, despite his sometimes ostentatious style. “We all knew he was a pretty flamboyant guy,” said the former president of a Crocus investee company. He had style and panache. And he seemed very powerful. But he was a positive influence on us, and always had a contribution to make.”

Umlah said he saw Crocus as a ìvalue-addedî partner that provided working capital, expertise and advice on how to secure co-investors and open new markets. This approach required Crocus to get deep inside its partners. “Private equity is a heavy body-contact business,” Umlah said. ” What I mean by that is you have to be reasonably close to your partners to know what’s happening. Because if you’re not, when you find out it’s way too late.”

As chief investment officer, Umlah said he managed a staff which included a vice-president of investments and a half-dozen certified investment analysts and monitors. The investment staff, Umlah said, provided a check and balance to potential conflicts of interest that might arise because the chief investment officer also sat on the board of directors of some of the investee companies. As a director, Umlah had a fiduciary responsibility to the investee company that might conflict with his responsibilities as chief investment officer.

The auditor general, however, believed Umlahís management style often saw him take over some of the due diligence and monitoring that might have been left to staff. Starting in the mid 1990s, Crocus sources said that Umlah also began to travel extensively to secure new contracts or capital for the companies he was overseeing. There were successes. But Crocus insiders say that while Umlah received wellearned credit for the fundís profitable investments, he seemed to escape criticism when money was lost.

Umlah had a direct involvement in three of the fundís largest losses: Westsun, a theatrical light and sound company; Winnport, a failed air cargo venture; and Isoboard, a plant that turned straw into particle board. In total, the three investments cost Crocus close to $40 million. A significant sum but not enough, Crocus sources said, to earn Umlah a rebuke from the board of directors. “You’ve just watched your chief investment officer piss out 40 million bucks; any board (of directors) would have gone, ‘Do we have the right guy here?” said a former Crocus staff member. “Any other fund would have questioned their chief investment officer and would have fired someone. But nothing happened.”

THE pristine beaches and sparkling waters of the eastern Mediterranean were Costas Ataliotisí secret weapon. When he wanted to woo an important investor, Ataliotis sometimes would invite them to his hometown of Limassol on the southern shores of the island of Cyprus. At the Wet and Wildî water park, an attraction Ataliotis said he co-owns, these key contacts and their families baked in the sun and body-surfed their way into the Protos International empire.

Ataliotis and partner David Wolinsky have used Protos International to build a significant inventory of business interests. The two businessmen currently own 60 per cent of Protos shares.

The “World of Protos,” as company brochures describe it, would grow to include Maple Leaf Distillers, Salisbury House Restaurants and various smaller subsidiaries involved in manufacturing, business consulting and film production. All the companies operate out of Maple Leafís plant on Saulteaux Crescent in St. James.

The varied interests in the world of Protos are in character with Ataliotis, who has enjoyed a diverse business career. He has been a manager of a downtown menís clothing store and a gemologist in a prominent family-owned Winnipeg retail jewelry chain. In the 1980s, he was managing partner in Winnipeg Jeep with well-known real estate agent Gary Bachman and former Winnipeg Jets owner Barry Shenkarow. In the mid-1990s, Ataliotis was named honorary consul to Manitoba by the Republic of Cyprus.

Wolinsky earned his reputation as a successful lawyer who specialized in the entertainment industry. He represented, among others, rock legends the Guess Who, Bachman Turner Overdrive, and singer and actor Tom Jackson. However, long before Wolinsky rubbed elbows with rock stars, his family’s name was already well known in Winnipeg business circles. His grandfather, Joseph Wolinsky, was one of Samuel Bronfmanís first partners in what would one day become the Seagramís distilling empire.

Many within the Winnipeg business community see Wolinsky and Ataliotis as the classic ìgood cop-bad copî duo. Wolinsky is quiet, restrained and has a wide reputation as an agreeable character who is given to calling everyone “pal.” Ataliotis, in contrast, is described by friends and colleagues as more emotional and less predictable.

Despite its name, Maple Leaf Distillers does not distill alcohol. Its spirits are purchased in bulk, transported to Winnipeg and then flavoured, blended and bottled on site. Umlah said in a recent interview that Maple Leaf represented ìan intriguing concept that looked like it had opportunity, good growth potential.”

In 2000, Crocus provided $1 million to Maple Leaf, and Umlah took a seat on the companyís board of directors. Umlah frequently described Maple Leaf as one of the fundís best investments, in large part because of the leadership of Wolinsky and Ataliotis. ìThis is really a prototype for a Crocus investment. We invest in the people, not the business,î Umlah said in 2001.

Ataliotis and Wolinsky worked quickly to establish Maple Leaf as a rapidly growing concern with international potential. In a December 2000 Free Press story, Wolinsky is quoted as saying Maple Leaf was selling hundreds of thousands of bottles of its marquee Maple Syrup Liqueur ìright off the floorî of a Paris trade show. Wolinsky also said the liqueur had been accepted for sale by most of the liquor commissions in Canada, including the Liquor Control Board of Ontario, the single largest buyer of spirits in the world.

In the same story, Ataliotis predicted Maple Leaf would earn $10 million in gross revenues in 2001 with a deal to distribute its line of 60 spirits and liqueurs in Europe.

Maple Leaf made its biggest splash in December 2001, when it landed a contract with Pernod Ricard, at that time the third-largest wine and spirit company in the world. Ataliotis said the partnership would see Pernod Ricard distribute Maple Leaf products across Canada, while Maple Leaf would store and manufacture Pernod Ricard products in Winnipeg.

Ataliotis said Pernod Ricard needed somewhere to manufacture new brands acquired in a high-profile, court-ordered division of assets from the Seagramís distilling empire. It was a deal, Ataliotis said, that would make Maple Leaf the largest Canadian-owned distillery in Canada with sales of more than $50 million annually. Food in Canada magazine, a major food and beverage trade publication, came up with a headline that said it all: “Winnipeg Distiller in the Big Leagues.”

To facilitate the Pernod Ricard deal, Maple Leaf announced at the same news conference it was moving to a $6.4-million, 100,000-square-foot plant in St. James. In a recent interview, Ataliotis said Pernod Ricard made it a requirement of their new partnership that Maple Leaf find larger storage and manufacturing facilities.

The province had acquired the new building as security on a defaulted government loan and sold it to Maple Leaf for $2.5 million while providing a $1.5-million loan to help with the expansion. “We feel very secure about this secured loan,” Premier Gary Doer said at the time. “These are not people who just put up a shingle last week.”

The Crocus Investment Fund announced on the same day it was upping its investment in Maple Leaf by $1.8 million. According to published accounts, the remaining $3.1 million in capital for the expansion was to come from well-known Protos shareholders such as now-Mayor Sam Katz, singer Burton Cummings, ex-Winnipeg Jet Thomas Steen, and prominent criminal lawyer Hersh Wolch.

The good news for Maple Leaf continued into 2002. In April, the same month Maple Leaf moved into its new St. James plant, Ataliotis called a news conference to announce a $10-million deal with Keg Brands, the retail arm of the successful Keg Steak House restaurant chain, to bottle ready-to-drink cocktails. The three-year deal, Ataliotis said, would boost Maple Leafís annual revenues to $55 million within one year.

When Maple Leaf announced three months later that its Platinum Vodka and Normís Moonshine coolers had taken gold medals at the prestigious American Tasting Institute competition, held at Carnegie Hall in New York City, it seemed like nothing could stop the little distillery from fulfilling its goal of becoming the nationís largest Canadian-owned distillery.

“It is something everybody (in the food industry) covets,” Wolinsky told the Free Press about the awards, “and it’s not supposed to be done by a company from Winnipeg.”

It was February 2002 and Costas Ataliotis had just returned to his St. James plant to announce that Maple Leaf was getting into the beer-brewing business.

Ataliotis excitedly informed his staff he had purchased all the equipment from the bankrupt Agassiz Brewing Company. He also called the Free Press to announce the new venture, and then posed for a photograph of himself and David Wolinsky standing alongside an enormous mixing tank. “We’ll be doing North American (lager) types of beer, maybe three types, but two for sure,” he told the Free Press.

However, there was a flaw in his plan.

Soon after announcing his new acquisition, Ataliotis found out from his staff that it was impossible to brew beer and distill alcohol in the same building. According to former staff, the beer brewing and fermentation process contaminates the ultra-hygienic spirit-bottling process.

Ataliotis was undeterred. In August, 2002, Ataliotis called the Free Press again to announce he had acquired the recipes and assets of a Phoenix brew pub.

Staff were surprised, but had come to expect the unexpected from Ataliotis. “He would just show up all the time with all kinds of crazy new ideas,” said one former employee. “He never asked anybody if we could do it, or whether we should do it. He just did it.” In the end, Maple Leaf never brewed beer.

For the most part, Maple Leafís first two years had been chock full of growth and exciting announcements. However, Maple Leaf was establishing a trend of failing to live up to its own hype. Maple Leaf’s much-touted contract to distribute Maple Syrup Liqueur through Ontario liquor stores ended less than a year after it began because of poor sales, a Liquor Control Board of Ontario spokesman said. Company sources said they never saw orders for hundreds of thousands of bottles of Maple Syrup Liqueur from the Paris trade show. In an interview, Wolinsky said he did not recall making the statements attributed to him in a December 2000 Free Press article.

In a September 2002 interview with Manitoba Business Magazine, Ataliotis said Maple Leaf products had been approved for sale in the 3,000 stores of Albertson’s Food and Drug, one of the largest grocery chains in the U.S. Sources said that no contract was ultimately signed. In a recent interview, Ataliotis explained the deal fell through when staff at some Albertson’s stores went on strike.

The biggest disappointment of 2002 was, not surprisingly, the collapse of the biggest deal Maple Leaf had ever announced: the partnership with Pernod Ricard. Pernod Ricard now claims statements made by Ataliotis and Wolinsky about the deal were exaggerated.

A Pernod Ricard spokesman said Armando de Medeiros, the president of Pernod Ricard Canada, came to Winnipeg for the December 2001 news conference on the understanding Maple Leaf would announce only a limited distribution deal. ì(Pernod Ricard) was approached in the summer of 2001 to distribute Maple Leaf products,î said Claude Boulay, general counsel for Pernod Ricard Canada. “It was a signed contract in September 2001. That was the only deal.”

Boulay said de Medeiros was surprised at the news conference. After that announcement, Boulay said Maple Leaf pressed de Medeiros to expand the deal to include manufacture of Pernod Ricard products. Boulay said de Medeiros eventually agreed to send some senior qualitycontrol staff to Winnipeg to investigate the new plant.

“Basically, it was a vacant building with a few scattered pieces of equipment,” Boulay said. ìThere was nothing to do there, and there was nothing to report on. So they never manufactured, or we never pursued the discussions.î Pernod Ricard did agree to distribute Maple Leaf products, but that deal fell through when Maple Leaf stopped paying its commissions, Boulay said. Pernod Ricard and Maple Leaf are battling each other in a court-ordered arbitration over Pernod Ricardís claims of $300,000 in unpaid commissions.

Ataliotis denied Boulay’s account. He said Pernod Ricard agreed to the deal as presented at the news conference, but later reneged because Maple Leaf brought its own brands of ready-todrink cocktail to market which were in direct competition with Pernod Ricardís newly acquired Seagramís brands.

Ataliotis said in a recent interview Maple Leaf was considering legal action against Pernod Ricard. To date, no lawsuit has been filed.

Regardless of what deal was agreed to, Ataliotis said the loss of anticipated business with Pernod Ricard put Maple Leaf in a difficult position.

“It was the biggest setback for our company,” he said. “It was a huge setback.”

Umlah said he was involved in negotiating the Pernod Ricard deal, although he cannot remember exactly what kind of relationship was supposed to unfold between the two companies. However, the failure to bring the larger partnership to fruition was a source of ìurgentî concern at Crocus, Umlah said. Maple Leaf was a growing company with potential, but its business plan had suffered a blow, he said.

“You have a company that has a plan and theyíre off their plan,” Umlah said. “The company itself had this magnitudinal growth that we didnít think was sustainable. We were pleased with the growth; now weíre quite concerned.”

Umlah said Wolinsky and Ataliotis, not unlike other entrepreneurs he has met, tried to bite off more than they could chew. The companyís public statements on earnings and new markets were exaggerated and ran well ahead of internal projections at Crocus, in Umlah’s opinion. However, Umlah said he discounted Maple Leaf’s “grandiose business plan.”

“We thought their expectations of growth were not realistic,” Umlah said.

RED flags were going up in the offices of the Crocus Investment Fund, but it had nothing to do with micro-brewed beer or Maple Syrup Liqueur. Investment analysts at Crocus had a whole other list of concerns with Maple Leaf Distillers.

The auditor generalís report cites a memo written in the fall of 2002 by a member of Umlahís investment staff raising a number of concerns about the Company A investment. In the memo, the staff member wrote that 50 per cent of the nearly $3 million invested in Company A had not yet been identified as a loan or as an equity investment. As a result, it was unclear whether Crocus was to be receiving interest on its investment, or whether it owned part of the company.

“We found no evidence that the former CIO (Umlah) responded to the e-mail,” Singleton says in his report.

Umlah said in an interview Singleton’s report presents an incomplete picture of the Maple Leaf investment. The monies invested in Maple Leaf involved both promissory notes and shares, with options to convert some of the debt to equity. If all of the Maple Leaf investment was converted to equity, Umlah said, it would have a much riskier investment with less opportunity to exit. A blend of debt and equity ìmitigatedî the risk to Crocus shareholders, Umlah said.

Umlah said even after the Pernod Ricard debacle, he believed Maple Leaf was still a company with high-growth potential, in large part because of improving prospects for entry into the U.S. market. Crocus had always believed that Maple Leaf would fine-tune its operation and make some mistakes in Canada before seeking its fortune south of the border.

The best opportunity to establish significant presence in the U.S. market came in the summer of 2003, when Maple Leaf announced it had reached a deal with Mutual Wholesale Liquor. The agreement would have seen Mutual Wholesale put Maple Leaf products into 2,000 retail outlets in California, a market larger than all of Canada. Ataliotis said at the time Maple Leaf would earn $20 million annually from this deal alone.

However, within weeks of the announcement, the deal fell through. Ataliotis said in an interview he killed the contract when he found out Mutual Wholesale did not have the presence in other states it had claimed. “When somebody that I start a relationship with tells me heís going to do $20 million, I believe,” Ataliotis said. “When I do my own research and find out that heís not capable of doing that, then I break the relationship.”

Sources from within the Protos group of companies said the Mutual Wholesale deal fell apart during a dispute over the rights to Maple Leaf’s brand products.

Umlah said Crocus believed Maple Leaf did not have the infrastructure, or the capital to build infrastructure, to meet the demands of the Mutual Wholesale contract. Maple Leaf required at least $5 million additional capital to make a big break into the U.S. market, and Crocus wasn’t prepared to provide them with that much additional money, he added.

Maple Leaf was now in a difficult position, Umlah said. It did not have the money to go forward into the U.S., but it had so much debt that there was no way to trim the company back to a small but profitable operation that bottled other peopleís recipes, he said.

Umlah said Crocus agreed to support the ìongoing burnî of capital as Maple Leaf tried to develop its U.S. opportunities. But Umlah said he told Wolinsky and Ataliotis to go out and look for new investors or invest the money themselves, because Crocus was not going to provide the $5 million. “We are not the bank here,” Umlah said.

“We will make investments prudent and reasoned and weíll co-invest with you.”

Despite having denied Maple Leafís need for a capital injection up front, over the next two years Umlah would return to the Crocus board and ask for nearly that much money in smaller installments.

Up to the spring of 2002, Crocus had provided $2.8 million to Maple Leaf. In the next 24 months, Crocus made numerous follow-on investments worth $4.6 million and provided a $1-million lineof- credit guarantee.

Umlah said all decisions on the Maple Leaf file were undertaken by a team of Crocus staff members, including the vice-president of investments, an investment analyst and a monitor. Recommendations from this group were passed through the chief executive officer and the head of the investment subcommittee. If an investee company received more money, it was the result of a “consensus” approach. “This wasn’t the James Umlah show,” Umlah added.

Umlah’s description of his role at Crocus is at odds with the view of Auditor General Jon Singleton, who says in his report the Company A investment was “primarily managed and monitored” by Umlah. The report says “due diligence effort at initial funding and ongoing for follow-on financings appears to have been materially deficient during most of the life of this investment.”

Most of the information about the evolution of the Company A investment came directly from Umlah, often in verbal form, Singleton says in his report. Umlah sat on Maple Leafís board of directors and should have had access to intelligence on the companyís successes and failures. According to Singleton’s report, if Umlah was aware of problems at Company A, he wasn’t telling investment staff or the board of directors.

That is not to say that Umlahís staff didnít have their own concerns. Singletonís report references a September 2003 memo to Umlah from an investment analyst who found the ìprincipals of the company had repaid a material amount of shareholder loans to themselves earlier in the year in contravention of contracted agreements with the fund.” As a major shareholder, Crocus should have been notified of any loan repayments.

Umlah dismissed the concerns of his staff member. Singleton says in his report that following that exchange, “the matter was left in his (Umlah’s) hands.”

dan.lett@freepress.mb.ca