Did K.C. Irving Take Dividends From His Newspapers?

Shane Parrish says K.C. Irving told a packed Senate hearing in Ottawa that he had never taken a salary, fee, or anything else from the newspapers, and that in 25 years they had paid him no dividends. The profits stayed inside the business.

Federal investigators had already searched the Irving newspapers, the offices and homes of senior executives, and K.C. Irving's house, carrying away thousands of documents. A Senate committee summoned him to Ottawa. The night before his testimony he sat on the edge of his hotel bed, working past midnight on his statement. He was 70, and for a quarter century had said almost nothing publicly about his newspapers. He had to explain why he owned every English language daily in New Brunswick. He made no apology for owning them so long as they were operated properly by people who cared about New Brunswick.

Senator Harper Prowse then assembled the rest of the Irving Group around the newspapers: a vast network of gasoline stations and dealers, a refinery, shipyards, a home builder, deep sea vessels, a pulp mill, millions of acres of forest, and roughly 13,000 employees. Each piece was connected to another, and nearly every piece was connected to New Brunswick. He asked whether anything that hurt New Brunswick would in one way or another hurt K.C. Irving's interests.