Donald Mercer Cormie (July 24, 1922 – February 20, 2010) was an American-born Canadian lawyer,

financier An investor is a person who allocates financial capital with the expectation of a future return (profit) or to gain an advantage (interest). Through this allocated capital the investor usually purchases some species of property. Types of in ...

and founder of the

Principal Group The Principal Group was a group of interrelated Canadian financial companies that collapsed in 1987, resulting in losses to an estimated 67,000 people. Losses were in recovered in part through provincial governments paying compensation, based on ...

History

Donald Cormie was a

United States Merchant Marine The United States Merchant Marine is an organization composed of United States civilian sailor, mariners and U.S. civilian and federally owned merchant vessels. Both the civilian mariners and the merchant vessels are managed by a combination of ...

from 1943 to 1944 before receiving his

LLM A large language model (LLM) is a language model trained with Self-supervised learning, self-supervised machine learning on a vast amount of text, designed for natural language processing tasks, especially Natural language generation, language g ...

from

Harvard Law School Harvard Law School (HLS) is the law school of Harvard University, a Private university, private research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1817, Harvard Law School is the oldest law school in continuous operation in the United ...

in 1946. With Jack W. Kennedy, Cormie co-founded the law firm Cormie Kennedy (1954-1987) in

Edmonton, Alberta Edmonton is the capital city of the Provinces and territories of Canada, Canadian province of Alberta. It is situated on the North Saskatchewan River and is the centre of the Edmonton Metropolitan Region, which is surrounded by Central Alberta ...

, and had a prestigious legal career. Cormie was the president and founder of one of Canada's largest investment firms, which became known as the

. The main companies associated with the Principal Group were First Investors Corporation, Associated Investors of Canada and Principal Savings and Trust Corporation. The associated corporations within the Principal Group grew to more than $1 billion of assets. The corporations were closed by regulators in 1987 and subsequently liquidated. At the time of the closures, approximately 67,000 investors were at risk of losing an estimated $500 million in funds advanced to Principal Group entities. Various provincial governments, including the Government of Alberta, the main regulator, paid an estimated $140 million in compensation on the losses of investor-savers, based on deficiencies in regulatory oversight. Brian Brennan
Principal Group Collapse: The Man Who Knew"
Extracted fro
''Boondoggles, Bonanzas, and Other Alberta Stories''
Fifth House Publishers, 2003, as reprinted in ''Business Edge'', January 6, 2004. Subsequent to the collapse of the Principal Group, Donald Cormie relocated to Arizona, and was never able to start another business. The legal fees associated with the collapse are estimated to have cost him $10 million. Donald Cormie pleaded guilty under the ''Investors Act'' to misleading investors and was fined half a million dollars. In addition, the

Tax Court of Canada The Tax Court of Canada (TCC; ), established in 1983 by the ''Tax Court of Canada Act'', is a federal superior court which deals with matters involving companies or individuals and tax issues with the Government of Canada. Jurisdiction Appeal ...

ordered him to pay $4 million in back taxes on a $7.2 million loan he took from Principal just before it collapsed. A further ruling was made by a judge of the

Court of Queen's Bench of Alberta The Court of King's Bench of Alberta (abbreviated in citations as ABKB or Alta. K.B.) is the superior trial court of the Canadian province of Alberta. During the reign of Elizabeth II, it was named Court of Queen's Bench of Alberta. The Court w ...

, who ruled that Donald Cormie made improper payouts totalling half a million dollars to creditors who were family members or company employees, and ordered that the creditors give back the money. Donald Cormie was also the founder of Cormie Ranch, a purebred cattle ranch near

Tomahawk, Alberta Tomahawk, Alberta is a hamlet in Alberta, Canada within Parkland County. It is located on Highway 759, northeast of the Town of Drayton Valley. The hamlet is located in Census Division No. 11 and in the federal riding of Yellowhead. Histor ...

. At its peak in the 1980s, it was the largest multi-breed purebred cattle ranch in Canada and the largest private bull semen bank in the world, developing sought-after bulls in the

Simmental The Simmental (; ) is an alpine valley in the Bernese Oberland of Switzerland. It expands from Lenk to Boltigen, in a more or less south-north direction ( Obersimmental), and from there to the valley exit at Wimmis near Spiez it takes a west-e ...

and

Maine-Anjou The Maine-Anjou is a French breed of domestic cattle, raised mainly in the Pays de la Loire region in north-western France. It was created in the nineteenth century in the historic province of Maine by cross-breeding the local Mancelle dairy c ...

breeds and earning $3.3 million from its prize bull, Signal.

History

References

Further reading