The stock (STE.TO), however, is doing wonderfully well for Stelco’s new owners and managers who are their way to a billion dollar gain. The former, rightful owners hold worthless certificates. Isn’t that a bloody disgrace to Canada’s capital markets?

The facts of the recent layoff at Stelco are such that if management is closing a particular mill, and affected employees are not qualified in other areas, management wants them out. This is only the first round that is affected by the closing of Stelco’s 56-inch hot strip mill. There will be another round of issues surfacing when the sale of the bar mill arises, and that will take an additional 200 to 300 jobs with it, which assumes status quo of the bloom mill. Those cuts may or may not have the option of staying with Stelco or moving on to the new company.

Download “Transition Assistance Program II”

Download “BTAP-II Waiver”

You may have noticed that the “new” owners failed to meet their legal obligations by paying the bondholders. But they did manage to spend millions in the corporate restructuring of Stelco into a number of individual pieces they could more easily dismantle. Divide and conquer.

I have written many blog articles about Stelco because I could see almost from the beginning that it had all the necessary elements of a manufactured fraud. It makes a good case study for a Business School.

You won’t find others writing about it because it was a most complex situation to try to get one’s head around to write about, and if the writer happened to work for one of the three media oligopoly units in Canada, they feared losing their jobs. We are told we live in a free country, but clearly that is a myth.

On the front page of the Hamilton Spectator newspaper this morning, Hamilton’s other major steel company, Dofasco, announced the hiring of a new CEO, Juergen Schachler, with talk about the downsizing that will occur there as well.

So, events in Steel City are moving fast, and the steelworkers are not surprised. They watched the “suits” from Toronto destroy the wealth of the former bondholders and shareholders, so these worker layoffs were expected.

The steelworkers tell me they expect all moves to be finalized by year’s end, including some sort of working relationship between Stelco and Dofasco. They say there is a continuing very strong rumour of up to 2500 jobs lost at Dofasco and the closing of their basic end.

This was Brascan/Brookfield’s plan from the get-go. Why? Because the previous management was insufficiently competent to be able to stop the tactics of those Barbarians at their gates. They watched as Brascan parachuted in a Board member and two executive officers, and commenced to buy enough of the company’s debt as a Trojan horse. After that, I reported the events as they happened. From the beginning, I told readers what to expect.

This story interested me for a couple reasons. One was that my Dad was a regular trader in Stelco stock. Another is that my brother’s daughter got married and lives in Steel City Hamilton, and I earned my MBA from Hamilton’s McMaster University.

While at that school at night, and taking CMA and CA designation courses during the day, there was a time I thought I might pursue a career in Mergers & Acquisitions. The one compulsory course to get the MBA was called Policy. We were expected to use the lessons from all our elective courses in that course. The major part of it was a computer-based business simulation game where 21 teams of four students went head to head. My team was comprised of four of us who had day jobs in accountancy or banking. In one of my most enjoyable times in life, my team had decided we would become a financial predator, much like Brascan/Brookfield, and our tactics were just as ruthless. As the weeks went by, each Saturday resulted in another one or two companies being taken over by my team. Then a couple weeks before the game was scheduled to end, the one remaining team in our path to total victory joined forces with the two professors and two teaching assistants to put a stop to our plan. Before the results came out, we accepted the professors’ challenge to loser pays for a champagne dinner for the winner. That dinner was enjoyable.

I was young, and at the time I really didn’t care that much for anybody except myself. I figured I could use my gift of intellect as a power to take things from others. The following year, with an MBA, CA, and CMA in hand I stepped out into a career of management consulting. Eight years later, having accomplished all I had wanted, I moved to a career in the securities industry – to become a trader, not an M&A staffer. I had become enamored with computer-based decision support. Then I quickly got into management, and six years after I started, I had built and managed the Eastern Canada operations of Canada’s largest non-bank owned broker-dealer. I built out 13,500 square feet on the penthouse floor of the Toronto Stock Exchange building, and the view from the corner office was terrific – except I wasn’t happy.

Somewhere along the way, I discovered that there is only one happiness we can achieve in life and that is to help others, not to take from them. I learned enough in the boardrooms of HB&B, however, to see that most of those people were not adding value, not building friendships, not helping people, regardless of anything they said.

After I retired in 4Q 2000, having built another successful brokerage firm, that one registered in all provinces of Canada, I got bored. Three years later I decided to do all that I could to help people learn from my experiences, and the best way I could was to explain, in this blog, how trading markets really work.

I have been fortunate not to have been subjected to the unfairness of private equity groups working in co-operation with lawyers and judges, bankers and others hoping to “get theirs”, which means, of course, to take wealth from others. I feel sorry for the steelworkers, the bondholders and shareholders, and the people of Hamilton who have lost so much to those Barbarians. It didn’t have to be that way. It doesn’t have to be that way.

What we need are thousands of people like me working in a virtual network who can independently and objectively bring these kind of situations out into the sunlight. We need people to get angry when their capital is stolen, and we need lawsuits to hold up the scoundrels from a free ride to riches.

As a registrant, I once believed that the SEC/OSC was like God. But, then I learned that “Subject to Regulatory Approval” has come to mean “Subject to the Approval of Private (and Often Undisclosed) Interests”.

As they did in the case of Stelco, our regulators have failed us. It’s time to take action.

And it’s time all owners and managers of capital stop saying, “There but for the grace of God go I”.