BUILDER GOES BUST
Sudbury family has waited since last fall to enjoy new Viceroy home — and it’s looking like they never will,
Sudbury resident Selina Jeanneault was so confident her family would be enjoying the views of the French River from their new Viceroy home by last September, she moved her daughter to a school close to what was supposed to be their new family home.
Since last fall, Jeanneault has been driving her 12-year-old daughter 45 minutes to school and 45 minutes back each day while their wood home — the interior piled high with snow — remains a mere shell on the shoreline.
Jeanneault and her husband Lee have little to show for the $170,000 she says they were pressured to hand over by Viceroy employees last year.
That’s before two framers walked off the oft-delayed job last December, claiming they hadn’t been paid by the 60-year-old Canadian company, famous for its iconic wood homes and signature soaring windows.
In fact, only three sides of the 4,000-square-foot house are standing today, five months after construction started months behind schedule, because the giant front panels with their distinctive peaked windows have yet to arrive.
There’s a good chance they never will.
Employees, suppliers and contractors remain largely in the dark about what’s happening at Viceroy, whose homes dot lakeshores and neighbourhoods as far away as Japan, Spain and Germany.
Unionized employees haven’t been paid since around Christmas and about 30 managers continue to work in the Port Hope, Ont., facility and other sales offices, staff told the Star, because they’ve been warned they won’t qualify for employment insurance benefits if they are seen to have walked off the job.
“I’m not sure when we started putting it all together and realized that something was wrong,” said Jeanneault in a telephone interview from Sudbury, Ont., fighting back tears. “We’re devastated by this. Our life savings are gone.”
The family doesn’t have enough money left to hire a lawyer, let alone pay someone else to finish the work, although just 60 per cent or so of the materials were even delivered last October.
It’s unclear how many other buyers are in the same boat.
“The drywall is on hold. The kitchen is on hold. We’ve been in contact with the company twice a week and they kept telling us, ‘We’re working on it.’ But enough is enough. We’re coming up to another summer, another year.”
The only hint of what’s going on behind the scenes at Viceroy, once a family-owned, publicly traded company that was purchased and privatized by a Russian company and is now owned by a Chinese consortium, was sent to Jeanneault in February.
It was a letter dated Feb. 20, addressed to one of the current principals, Vancouver-based Joseph Kwok. It was signed by Malcolm Sask, vicepresident of British Columbia-based Wiston Building Materials Ltd., the “international office” of a Chinabased engineered wood flooring company, according to Sask’s LinkedIn site.
“We are prepared to immediately go ahead with a formal due diligence on the business in preparation to purchase outright all the Viceroy business units,” wrote Sask, urging that the letter be forwarded to creditors or anyone owed payment.
Sask said his company is “in the process of finalizing a purchase agreement. Once the agreement is in place we expect to inject equity that will clear existing liabilities and allow continued operations and growth of the 60 year history of Viceroy.”
But Sask has had issues of his own. He declared bankruptcy in 2009, when he was running a company called Chigaboom Media Inc., citing $117,572 in liabilities and $17,392 in assets.
In 2013, Wiston was successfully sued by a flooring competitor, Woodpecker Hardwood Floors, that wanted Wiston to stop using Woodpecker’s trade name and logo. Wiston tried unsuccessfully to appeal.
“There are some skeletons in the closet of every company,” Sask told the Star Tuesday. “All businesses have ebbs and flows.”
Besides having tested for “very high emotional intelligence,” Sask’s LinkedIn profile notes he has worked in Shanghai for 3 1⁄ years and contin
2 ues to travel there on business.
Viceroy has been trying to expand into China to make better use of its secondary factory in Richmond, B.C. It was established about a decade ago to service international markets, largely in Japan, that have since dropped off dramatically, contributing to the company’s woes.