CEO moving to Denver, but no plans to move HQ: Encana
Encana Corp.’s chief executive Doug Suttles is relocating from Calgary to Denver, but the company says there are no plans to move the headquarters south of the border.
Suttles’s plans to move from Calgary, where Encana is headquartered, to its Denver office by the end of the spring — a move that has stoked fears in Calgary that the headquarters could move too, given half of Encana’s capital is deployed in U.S. shale basins.
Concern about companies relocating out of Calgary has become more intense since tax reforms were implemented in the U.S., where many Canadian oil and gas producers such as Encana have large operations and a possible financial incentive to move.
But Encana spokesperson Jay Averill said Suttles was leaving Calgary for personal reasons and that the executive already spends parts of his time working out of Encana’s 800-person Denver office.
He said the move is not a precursor to a larger, officewide relocation.
Encana’s Calgary office is slightly larger than the Denver office, with close to 1,000 people working there.
“We’re not moving other staff and, no, we’re not relocating our head office,” Averill said Friday. “That’s a definitive ‘no’ on that.”
The company’s production, capital and staff are all “pretty evenly split” between the two cities and that Suttles’s move would have little to no effect on the company’s day-to-day operations, Averill said.
The move, however, comes at a time when many domestic oil and gas companies are calling on the provincial and federal governments to make the province more competitive relative to the U.S., where U.S. President Donald Trump has overhauled the tax system and eliminated regulations.
Amid those calls, speculation about which Canadian companies could be enticed to move south is high.
Earlier this month, Ted Morton, a former minister of energy in Alberta, suggested in a Financial Post column that TransCanada Corp. is considering a move to Houston. But the pipeline company has denied it.
“Respectfully, it is TransCanada’s corporate policy not to speculate on rumours and speculation and this would certainly fit those categories,” company spokesperson Mark Cooper said of a potential move.
Suttles made $13 million in 2016, according to the company’s most recent management compensation disclosure. He was hired in 2013.