Generous Canadian taxpayers creating jobs in Finland shipyard

Good news, Canadian taxpayers! Your tax dollars are finally creating those good well-paying jobs we’re always hearing about. Unfortunately, the jobs are in Finland. But don’t worry. Once the hulls are complete, they will be towed to the Davie yard in Quebec for outfitting. By then you can bet your bottom dollar the cost will have doubled and the completion date will have been extended multiple times. That’s the Davie way; their motto; Blowing Up Budgets and Deadlines For 150 Years. Most reporting on this story implies Davie is a Canadian company. It isn’t. It is owned by Inocea Group. Take a look at their board of directors and you’ll find great depth of financial engineering expertise but a noticeable lightness on the naval engineering side. In 2017 the Globe & Mail published an investigation of Inocea. Here’s a quote from the story: A Globe and Mail investigation has discovered that Davie is owned by a complex web of companies that can be traced from Canada and the United Kingdom to the tax havens of Monaco and the British Virgin Islands. The paper’s journalists ran into a dead end trying to trace the beneficial owners of Inocea. They also own the shipyard in Finland where the hulls are being fabbed. Their modus operandi appears to be buy bankrupt shipyards and then lobby hard for government contracts. We’ve made multi-billion dollar commitments to a concern whose controlling investors hide behind a thicket of numbered companies registered in tax havens. Given their success in squeezing money out of governments, I’m guessing there’s some serious names hiding in those secret documents.