Inside the battle for control of Rogers and the ensuing family feud

By Alexandra Posadzki

On a Friday in mid-September, several days before many Canadians would cast their ballots in a federal election, Joe Natale had cellphones on his mind.

It’s fair to say the 57-year-old chief executive officer of Rogers Communications Inc. almost always has cellphones on his mind. The company he runs provides more than 10 million people with wireless service, which means roughly one out of every four Canadians uses a device powered by Rogers, and the telecom’s wireless network facilitates millions of calls per day.

But on this day, Sept. 17, Mr. Natale was preoccupied with just one phone call in particular, an accidental one he was never meant to be on.

At the time, Mr. Natale was cooking dinner with his wife. On the other end of the line was Tony Staffieri, the company’s long-time chief financial officer and a close C-suite colleague of Mr. Natale’s. Mr. Staffieri was speaking with David Miller, whose voice would have been familiar to Mr. Natale; Mr. Miller had, until fairly recently, been the chief legal officer at Rogers.

The two men, who sounded like they were on a patio, were talking about how Mr. Staffieri was going to lead the company once Mr. Natale was out of the way. This was news to Mr. Natale, of course, who was in the midst of the most significant transaction in the company’s 60-year history, a $26-billion merger with Calgary-based Shaw Communications Inc. The deal, if approved by regulators, would transform Rogers into the truly national carrier its founder wanted it to be.

But the plot to oust him did not stop there, Mr. Natale learned as he listened, surreptitiously, to the call. Other senior members of the company’s leadership team – nine of 11, to be precise – would be purged as well, either forced out with Mr. Natale or trailing him.

That inadvertent phone call exposed a plan that has plunged one of the country’s largest telecom and media empires into chaos, and ignited the most spectacular boardroom and family drama in Canadian corporate history – one that that has riven the founding Rogers clan and cast the $30-billlion publicly traded company as the prize in a bizarre, calamitous duel between two factions that both claim to have control. Son against mother, sisters against brother, an old guard rallying to vanquish the new.

The most recent twist has found the two sides headed to court over who sits on the company’s board, after a move by chair Edward Rogers to replace five independent directors who had opposed him was declared invalid by the company.

To piece together what happened over an extraordinary 10 days, The Globe and Mail spoke with four sources familiar with the matter and its fallout, and consulted documents Mr. Rogers filed in court this week. The Globe and Mail is not identifying the sources because they were not authorized to discuss the matter publicly.

The result details a sequence of audacious actions that began with preparations for Mr. Natale’s departure immediately after the plot was revealed, but ended with Mr. Natale holding onto the top job and the exit of his rival and would-be successor – who may yet return to take the throne if Mr. Rogers has his way.

Published by the Globe and Mail.