Why We Love to Hate Ian Thow

Last year Ian Thow, vice-president of Victoria, BC’s local Berkshire Investment Group branch, skipped the country and left dozens of local creditors and investors in the lurch for tens of millions of dollars. While some had wealth to spare, it’s difficult not to feel for those who mortgaged away homes and retirement savings.

However, this April, Berkshire reached confidential settlements with a good number of Thow’s victims, and continues to negotiate.

So maybe we can finally speak more frankly, without feeling as if we’re salting open wounds with personal insults.

Were these investors really only “victims”? And what was the general public’s role in this massive scam that endured for years?

On one level, it’s open-and-shut: Thow apparently told these people he’d invest their money, and instead pocketed it. He’s a criminal; everyone else a victim. That’s the story as presented, anyway.

But examining public perceptions of this prominent man over the years reveals a more unsettling picture of the complicity of everyone else.

For example, many scammed investors have repeatedly described Thow’s personality as “charming”, “warm” and “inspiring”. “He made you feel so good about having him as an investment adviser,” said one.

At the same time, they’ve described Thow’s expensive clothing, jewelry, furniture and homes, $500 bottles of wine, $1,000 cigars, private jets with gold seat-buckles, and lunchtime local commuting in helicopters.

Thow also habitually showed off his wealth in public venues, promising huge donations to prominent institutions and causes and bidding exorbitant sums at charity auctions.

So what’s my point? Evidently, long gone are the days when ordinary, responsible adults would find such extravagant waste and self-aggrandizing display unethical and revolting.

On the contrary, most were obviously blushed with pleasure to be in Thow’s rich embrace. Indeed, local media should issue confessionary apologies, like the New York Times did for its unquestioning reporting on Iraqi WMDs. Until 2005, for example, Thow was promoted frequently and favourably by over a dozen different Times-Colonist writers.

Here’s Ian Thow helping the Commonwealth Games. And here he is taking a pie in the face for children’s charity. Now he’s mingling with celebrities, raising money for a university scholarship, donating to the hospital in memory of his mother, manning phones in the TC‘s Christmas fundraiser, and serving turkey to the homeless while assuring everyone he’s “not doing it for publicity.”

And ooh, check it out: Ian Thow posing in his sleek new “million dollar office” with $1,000 phones and $15,000 tables, all especially designed for highly productive, “far-sighted executives”. So it’s very fortunate that we have such executives available to provide insight on the federal government’s election-year budget: “I thought over-all it’s a good piece of work,” commented Ian Thow. (Want your vote back? Contact the TC.)

In fairness, TC archives are just the easiest to search. Such coverage is merely one aspect of our increasingly widespread tendency to ennoble and envy monetary gain, without any critical or socially-conscious faculties intervening.

And it fuels corruption. For instance, according to published figures, one of the imaginary initiatives in which Thow’s victims invested was providing loans to Vancouver developers at 10% quarterly, plus 10% “lending fees”. Well, add the numbers: Those outrageous interest rates approached 60% annually, borderline illegal. Should we really feel sorry for people whose loan-sharking scheme didn’t pan out?

Thow’s other scams were similar high-yield stings, which the investors obviously hungrily wolfed down whole without doing an iota of research. What could possibly have turned the National Commercial Bank of Jamaica into a “hot” stock worth mortgaging your house for? It’s a 170-year old institution serving a tiny island whose meager economic strengths are tourism, bauxite and illegal drugs. Since a government bail-out in 1997, the bank’s own Annual Reports could best be described as humbly, reservedly hopeful. Did the investors believe themselves illegally privy to some crucial inside information? Or had they simply not thought it through, uncaring about what impacts their enormous dollars might actually be having in impoverished, violence-riddled Jamaica?

As much as by Thow, then, the investors were victimized by our culture’s laissez-faire standard of investing blindly through others, and by their own greed. As one couple described it, they were “happy and secure” and debt free with a “nice, lovely home”…

Yet…

They ultimately mortgaged it all into that loan scam.

Similarly, what made even some multi-millionaires chase high-yield investments? Does our greed really know no bounds?

Today, Thow is as reviled as he once was applauded. His admired personal ambition is now understood as sociopathic unscrupulousness. His luxurious lifestyle and generosity are seen for what they actually were: blatant waste, sleazy sycophancy and shameless self-promotion. His keen broker’s eye for assessing people and businesses now looks positively sinister. And scant concern for the moral issues surrounding wealth and how one obtains it suddenly doesn’t seem laudably pragmatic, but risky, cruel and destructive.

They’re important insights. But they have little value when we’re ignoring our complicity. Are we focusing criticisms on Thow because it’s too painful to behold how sycophantic and blind our own greed has become? Indeed, would we even be judging Thow harshly if he’d turned his wily arts on, say, on some cash-strapped developers or needy Jamaicans, instead of on us?

Thow was a bad investment, and courts may be the final arbiters of whether he broke the law. In the meantime, it’s much more vital to vigorously re-evaluate the kinds of behaviours in which we invest our admiration.

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Originally published in Focus, July 2006.

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