Inventor Alvin Liknes: his struggle for success in oil sector
Before his alleged killing by an associate, victim had a creative career, with an unlucky streak
The dispute was a petty one. The grudge that may, according to family members, link Douglas Garland to the alleged murders of a Calgary couple and their grandson was over nothing more tangible than recognition.
Murder victim Alvin Liknes was a businessman and inventor who had filed several patents since the mid1970s. His most recent inventions focused on ways to prolong the life of natural gas and oil wells by removing water.
According to a relative of Mr. Liknes, Mr. Garland altered one of the patents and believed he should have been included as one of the inventors. Mr. Liknes paid for the work, but would not give Mr. Garland credit for the invention, said the family member, who described the dispute as ‘‘petty.’’
Mr. Liknes was remembered by all who recounted him to the National Post as an likeable problem-solver — a man known for being creative and affable, but long unlucky in business. The entrepreneur can be linked to almost a dozen companies in the oil and gas and construction sectors over the past 20 years. Some of them focused on his patents; others on volatile resource plays in remote Northern Alberta.
Many of them dwindled into obscurity, or went bankrupt.
Mr. Liknes, his wife, Kathy, and five-year-old grandson Nathan O’Brien are presumed dead, although their bodies have not been found. Mr. Garland, 54, whose sister is in a relationship with Alvin Liknes’s son, has been charged with the first-degree murder of the adults, and the seconddegree murder of Nathan.
The accused has a long history with police; he was convicted of manufacturing drugs on his family’s farm near Airdrie, Alta.; he evaded capture for seven years throughout the 1990s by stealing the identity of a teenager who died in a car crash in Cardston, Alta., in 1980.
Meanwhile, Mr. Liknes’ business dealings faced the scrutiny of police trying to find a motive for the trio’s disappearance.
The most recent business failure was Winter Petroleum Ltd., a natural gas exploration company that operated in the Rainbow Lake and High Level area. Mr. Liknes ran the company for three years until it went bankrupt days before he disappeared. Amid declining returns for natural gas, it found itself $800,000 in arrears for property taxes and penalties.
“During the last three years where Alvin was with Winter, we were having a very tough time with historic low gas prices and high operating costs and high taxes. There was no money left,” said Marek Kozera, one of the employees and directors of the firm.
However, Winter was not working with any of Mr. Liknes’ patents, he said.
Mr. Kozera said the reputed patent dispute between Mr. Garland and Mr. Liknes occurred “before Alvin’s joining Winter. He never mentioned [Douglas Garland] and Winter had no dealings with this man.”
Mr. Liknes was working on a patent with Vecto Resources Ltd. He listed himself as that company’s president on his LinkedIn profile, although Vecto was dissolved in 2010, according to corporate registry records. A similar patent was also filed jointly with Mr. Liknes and a company called Northern Pressure Systems Ltd. in 2001. One of the shareholders and directors of that company was Dick Bonnycastle, who operated Harlequin Enterprises before it was sold to the Toronto Star.
Mr. Bonnycastle told the National Post that he vaguely remembered Mr. Liknes, but the inventor hadn’t been involved with the company for about a decade. The pump was built, but never proved to be economically viable. Investment was further stalled when natural gas prices tanked in 2008. Northern Pressure Systems went dormant.
Mr. Liknes’ business problems can be traced to at least 1994, when he declared bankruptcy. According to recently obtained files, Mr. Liknes claimed his financial misfortune was the result of a bad investment.
“I owned a company by the name of A.C.L. Resources Ltd. that lent substantial funds to related company Cherhill Resources, who in turn invested in a gold mine. Cherhill eventually went into bankruptcy. A.C.L. was unable to use the loss for tax purposes,” Mr. Liknes wrote. At the time A.C.L. owed money to Revenue Canada and was unable to pay the bill.
“I am now faced with a large tax debt personally due to a reassessment that I am unable to pay.”
Mr. Liknes was also majority owner of Cherhill Resources. The file showed he sold a lot on Vancouver Island for $32,000 to prop up the company. It went bankrupt shortly afterward.
Another item in his file showed that he was sued by a man named Harris N. Hanson, who claimed the businessman had made “material misrepresentations” that allegedly induced Mr. Hanson to advance $25,000 to Cherhill Resources Inc.
The bankruptcy file also revealed that Mr. Liknes was an employee of, and had been offered options to purchase shares in, a company called Granisko Resources Inc., which also subsequently went bankrupt.
In the 1990s, Granisko took out junk bonds to finance natural gas plays; by 1995, it owed $56-million — more than its assets were worth in the face of declining natural gas prices, according to The Globe and Mail at the time.
“I thought we had a fighting chance. There was some hope that the company could work its way out of this. Unfortunately, that has proven not to be the case,” then president Jack Peltier told the newspaper.
Among Granisko’s assets as listed in Mr. Liknes’s bankruptcy proceedings were oil and gas wells in Alberta and Saskatchewan. The business operated mainly out of Rainbow and Zama Lakes in Northern Alberta.
On the weekend they disappeared, Mr. Liknes and his wife were preparing for a life of retirement. Their grandson was visiting as they held an estate sale at their home in Calgary’s Parkdale neighbourhood; they were hoping to clear out furniture before spending several months in Mexico. They then planned to settle in Edmonton.