About the Wes Hall-affiliated QM Environmental entering creditor protection, I missed a few things. The total liabilities amount to $98m. Wes Hall has extended debtor-in-possession financing in the amount of $14m. The Globe also identified celebrity corporate lawyer Walied Soliman as a partner in the business. He controls a numbered company that owns 10% of QM Environmental.
Walied is the Canadian chair of global law firm Norton Rose Fulbright. I plan to write about him in a separate post later. Wes and Walied are bosom buddies. Or peas in a pod if you prefer. Walied has an active practice helping companies that are targets of activist investors and Wes Hall is the current king of the proxy advisory space. Wes Hall’s main business, Kingsdale was built on the strength of referrals from lawyers. So it’s a synergistic partnership. Will this latest development cause a cleavage in their bosom buddyship? I don’t know, did I say I was a relationship expert? If you have any info about Walied Soliman, please send it along.
I also missed that Wes Hall pre-emptively addressed QM’s creditor protection filing on LinkedIn. But first, just to draw a contrast, here’s how the Globe summarizes issues the company faced:
“While the Company has successfully operated its Business for 40 years and is considered an industry leader, it has experienced significant financial and operational challenges in recent years that have resulted in a liquidity crisis,” QM chief executive Agnes Wietrzynski wrote in an affidavit.
Ms. Wietrzynski noted that the company has faced a series of operational and financial challenges, including employee turnover and retention issues – particularly at the management level – as well as deficiencies with internal financial tracking. She said the company has also encountered challenges maintaining bonding support, which has made it more difficult to secure contracts, as well as cash-flow problems stemming from unreleased project holdbacks.
That's a summary taken from the CEO’s sworn affidavit. In contrast, here’s how Wes Hall explains the situation on LinkedIn.
The economic strain caused by global trade tensions, inflation, and rising material costs has hit some sectors harder than others. Unfortunately, QM was one of them.
He forgot to mention systemic anti-Black racism and the legacy of slavery. Try to figure how “global trade tensions” could be a prime factor in a company involved in “environmental remediation, demolition, emergency response and water-treatment services.”
In a second LinkedIn post, Wes writes:
As an entrepreneur, going through bad times in your business is not a failure. We do not control everything, especially when there are fierce, well-financed competitors, geopolitical issues, change in customer decision making and their own financial health. These are all things beyond your control. Yet this is viewed as failure in some circles and in fact is celebrated.
Again, he's blaming forces outside his control. He adds:
My message to entrepreneurs: Tune out the noise and stay true to who you are. Focus on the people rooting for you. If you are someone of notoriety, the media will try to sell subscriptions at your expense. Their headline will be all about your perceived troubles and when you are successful there will be no stories about your resilience. That’s just life.
By then, I imagine the Globe had started making inquiries, which may explain his post as pre-emptive. In actual fact, the Globe headlined its article: “QM Environmental files for creditor protection with almost $98m in liabilities.” This is a restrained choice of title, not even mentioning Wes Hall. To date, no other media publication has even bothered to write up this story. So the ratio of positive Wes Hall stories versus negative is still something like 10 to 1 or 50 to 1. Wes Hall is the whiniest mogul in Canada!
Wes Hall also says: You must have the support of everyone who relies on you and if those forces are working against you, it’s almost impossible to work through those bad times.
Some dark shadowy forces are at work! Wes Hall has recast himself as a private equity maven (ie “WeShall Investments”). But this is vintage hedge fund manager talk: if things go well you are brilliant, but if your holdings have a setback, it’s the Fed’s fault! I mentioned previously that QM didn’t exactly have a Wakanda-inspired cadre of executives, but I have since found that one Brentyn Hall is a director. He is half-Black. Wes Hall has said that he often walks into boardrooms and finds he’s the only Black person in the room. The same thing happens when he walks into his bedroom.