The prosecutor invited 917 people thought to be victims of Arlan Galbraith and his Pigeon King International business, but only 10 showed up and two phoned in.
One of those two, former salesman Bill Top, hung up because another salesman, Mark DeWitt, was at the meeting in Kitchener.
The sparse turnout considerably weakens the fraud case the prosecutors are making against Galbraith – that he was operating a Ponzi scheme to persuade people to invest in breeding-stock pigeons.
Police say about 1,000 people invested to fill contracts worth about $20 million. Many were from near Kitchener, but others were from across the United States and Western Canada, including a Hutterite colony in Alberta with a $1-million contract.
Some are not surprised at the low turnout.
One reason is that many who signed contracts are Mennonites who will not take another person to court.
Another is that the majority of the losses are hypothetical – broken promises of future income from the sale of breeding-stock offspring to Pigeon King. The contracts stretched out years: the “victims” have not incurred feed and other expenses in production for future years.
A third reason is that some investors realized the business might not last, so when they built housing, they designed it to be useful for a number of purposes.
Whatever the reasons for failing to attend, assistant crown prosecutor Lynn Robinson conceded that her case is weakened by the lack of witnesses.
Three of the 12 involved in the meeting were former Pigeon King employees.
Top is relatively important because he left the company and began warning investors that the business would collapse.
I predict this whole case against Galbraith will collapse. Certainly many of the investors ought to have known that the demand for breeding stock would be limited, so in that sense, they are just as guilty as Galbraith of trying to get rich at the expense of clients.
