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Partly because Canada does not have many statutes limiting the concentration of capital, much of its wealth is held by a few fabulously rich families. While most Canadian tycoons are neither required by law nor inclined by nature to disclose the details of their holdings, a new book titled Controlling Interest: Who Owns Canada? by Toronto Star Financial Writer Diane Francis < asserts that just 32 families own more than one-third of the country's nonfinancial assets. Many of those families have built up sizable stakes in the U.S.
Some of the most prominent investors from the North:
ROBERT CAMPEAU. In Ottawa it is said that Campeau owns the skyline. He made his first real estate investment in 1942 as a 19-year-old machinist. Campeau built a house, sold it for a 50% profit and started another. Within ten years he was building apartments and office towers, and now owns Canadian real estate worth $1 billion. Allied rejected his first offer of $58 a share last August, when the stock was trading at 48. But Campeau eventually won Allied's consent with an offer of $69 a share, helped by a $1.8 billion loan from First Boston. Said Allied Chairman Thomas Macioce last week: "We got our shareholders the best price possible."
THE REICHMANNS. Robert Campeau is little more than middle class when compared with the Reichmann family of Toronto. As reclusive as they are shrewd, the three Reichmann brothers -- Albert, 56, Paul, 54, and Ralph, 52 -- have quietly built a dominion estimated to be worth $18 billion since they fled Austria with their parents during World War II. With the savings they were able to bring out, the family bankrolled construction and steel ventures in Toronto, eventually moving into real estate speculation. In 1977 Wall Street hardly noticed when Olympia & York, the development firm founded by the brothers, picked up eight Manhattan skyscrapers at a distress-sale package price of $400 million during New York City's fiscal crisis. Today those buildings are valued at some $3 billion.
Now the world's largest owners of office space, the Reichmanns control about 30 million sq. ft. of U.S. real estate, worth an estimated $10 billion. The glittering centerpiece: their new $1.5 billion Battery Park City project, part of a vast new chunk of Wall Street waterfront created on 92 acres of landfill in Manhattan. Among the companies ensconced in Olympia & York's elegant copper-and-granite towers there: Merrill Lynch, American Express and Dow Jones.
THE BELZBERGS. The most aggressive corporate raiders to sweep down from Canada, the Vancouver-based Belzbergs have made profitable runs on the stock of a dozen or so major U.S. corporations during the past few years. In 1984 they teamed up with T. Boone Pickens in an attempt to take over Gulf Oil. The bid failed, but seven months later the Belzbergs sold their $87 million stake in the company for $157 million. Last March the family threatened a takeover of Ashland Oil (1985 sales and revenues: $8.2 billion), collecting a $16 million "green-mail" profit when management bought back its shares.