Power Financial

"The rest of the year was spent consolidating the new Power Fi¬ nancial and getting its North American subsidiaries to work together, selling each others’ services where legally permitted. Another task was setting up the infrastructure for co-operation of Power Financial’s North American units, where it was practical and legally permitted, with Pargesa and its global financial-services subsidiaries, including Groupe Bruxelles Lambert and its New York investment house sub¬ sidiary, Drexel Burnham Lambert."

"At the same time, Desmarais made abortive bids for Tele-Metropole ($97 million), which operates a French tv station in Montreal, and Teleglobe Canada ($300 million), the Crown corporation that provides overseas long-distance phone services to Canadians. He also wanted to buy Domtar and Donohue, two huge forest and packaging products companies, for merger with Consolidated-Bathurst. The two had been acquired by the Caisse de Depot et Placement du Quebec under the Parti Quebecois regime in Quebec in the early 1980s. The unsuccessful bids for Tele-Metropole and Teleglobe put a crimp in Desmarais’s plans for the Power Corp. that he hoped to hand over to his sons. Desmarais wanted Tele-Metropole for two reasons, one being that it would make the perfect core corporation for another Power subsidiary he wished to set up and call Power Communications. All of Power’s communications holdings — the daily and weekly newspapers, publishing interests, radio and tv — most of them held through Gesca Ltee., would be grouped in the new company, which would be created much the same way Power Financial had been. His younger son, Andre, a Power vice-president in charge of communi¬ cations holdings, would eventually assume presidency of the new company, as his brother, Paul Jr., had at Power Financial."