In this post, I will show an intriguing email by celebrity corporate lawyer Walied Soliman to then OSC Chair Grant Vingoe (and others) on behalf of Ninepoint Partners. In this email, Walied is pleading for the OSC to tell everyone that Ninepoint did nothing wrong that contributed to the collapse of Bridging Finance.
Here’s the context of this email:
Ninepoint was famously Bridging Finance’s BFF - Ninepoint parted ways with Bridging Finance in 2018, when it suspected some shenanigans at some funds where both parties were co-managers. But did Ninepoint alert regulators? We doubt it, and if they did, the regulators were slow to react. Three years post-split, in May 2021, the OSC forces Bridging Finance into receivership and launches a full investigation. Investors are screwed, it’s the talk of Bay Street. There’s a bit of a contagion effect to other private debt funds that percolates slowly over many months. In September 2021, OPM Wire started writing critically about Ninepoint private debt funds.
By the end of February 2022, overwhelmed by the wave of redemptions, Ninepoint has to put up gates on several private debt funds. This was a bit of an existential crisis for Ninepoint, considering how material debt funds are to their overall assets under management. In early March, the enforcement division of the OSC has some sort of email exchange with Ninepoint. This could be them asking questions of Ninepoint or it could be Ninepoint asking the OSC to clear the cloud overhanging them because of their prior association with Bridging Finance. (I don’t have access to those emails.) On Sunday, March 6th, Ninepoint Co-CEO John Wilson writes to his lawyer Walied Soliman as follows:
John Wilson's request is that the OSC needs to exculpate Ninepoint pronto in respect of its conduct as Bridging Finance's former BFF. He says the "process below", likely meaning, the lower-level interactions with the OSC, is going to "take forever." References to "the blog" are references to OPM Wire - Ninepoint complained many times that this blog was a key reason behind advisors fleeing their funds.