Канадалық миллиардер Майкл Ли Чиннің өмірбаяны

Canadian businessman (born 1951)

Michael Lee Chin, (born 3 January 1951) is a Jamaican Canadian billionaire businessman, philanthropist and the chairman and CEO of Portland Holdings Inc, a privately held investment company in Ontario, Canada. Lee Chin was appointed to the Order of Ontario in 2017. In 2016, Lee Chin was appointed chairman of the government of Jamaica's Economic Growth Council (EGC). Lee Chin has made several large pledges and/or donations in Canada to the Royal Ontario Museum in 2003, the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto, McMaster University and the Joseph Brant Hospital Foundation. Lee Chin served as chancellor of Wilfrid Laurier University.

Lee Chin was born in Port Antonio, Jamaica, in 1951 to Aston Lee and Hyacinth Gloria Chen. Both his parents were biracial African and Jamaican Chinese. When Lee Chin was aged seven, his mother married Vincent Chen who had a son from a previous relationship, and the couple had seven children together, six boys and one girl. Lee Chin's mother sold Avon products and worked as a bookkeeper for various local firms, while his stepfather ran a local grocery store. He attended the local high school, Titchfield High, between 1962 and 1969.

In the late 1980s, AIC suffered from a collapse in the real estate market, in which it had invested. It recovered throughout the early 1990s by maintaining investments in large groups, such as Merrill Lynch and TD bank (formerly Toronto Dominion). This caused investments to grow from US$8 million in 1990 to nearly US$8 billion by 1998. Lee Chin was reluctant to invest in the dotcom boom, and saw AIC investments lose 8 per cent in value, even as the S&P gained 56 per cent. Investors moved US$224 million out of AIC's flagship "Advantage Mutual Fund". The Globe and Mail ran an article predicting that even more investors would leave the fund, meaning that it would run out of cash and be forced to sell its core holdings. Lee Chin's response was to sell stock in Coca Cola, and invest US$65 million into Mackenzie Holdings (the same firm in which he had invested US$400,000 16 years previously). Letters were sent to all 350,000 investors, explaining the strategy. The investors were calmed by the purchase, and the stock was later sold to Investor Group (the same company Lee Chin had worked for in the 1980s) at more than twice the price AIC had paid for it. In 2000 and 2001, following the dotcom crash, AIC outperformed the market with 26 per cent growth and 4 per cent decline respectively. In November 2003, AIC was part of a regulatory investigation involving 105 Canadian mutual funds companies. In its review of AIC, investigators found no evidence of late trading and market timing activity by AIC staff. However, the Ontario Securities Commission (OSC) did find that over the 1999–2003 period, AIC permitted specific third party investors to engage in market timing trades in AIC Funds that generated profits of $127 million. In the Settlement Agreement between AIC and the OSC, the OSC stated that "Accordingly, the conduct of AIC in failing to protect fully the best interests of the Relevant Funds in respect of the frequent trading market timing was contrary to the public interest." As a result, in December 2004, AIC Limited was forced to return CAD $58.8 million to affected investors, which was the largest penalty imposed on any of the fund companies in the OSC investigation. On 5 October 2006, Lee Chin announced his resignation as CEO of AIC, to be replaced by Jonathan Wellum, AIC's chief investment officer. In 2005, two investment product managers offering structured products joined the Portland Holdings portfolio, Copernican Capital Corporation has offered retail investment products, primarily sold by brokers, and has raised more than C$800 million, in 10 closed end funds since its launch. Markland Street Asset Management, which launched the Oil Sands Sector Fund, raised C$430 million in one of Canada's largest closed end IPOs.

In 1974, he married Vera Lee Chin, a Ukrainian Canadian whom he had met at university. They separated in 1997 and are now divorced. Vera Lee Chin had contested the terms of the separation agreement, claiming that Lee Chin did not disclose his actual wealth at the time of the separation. The couple had three children, Michael Jr., Paul, and Adrian. Lee Chin now lives with his wife Sonya Lee Chin, with whom he has fraternal twin daughters, Elizabeth and Maria, in Burlington, Ontario.

Forbes first added Lee Chin to its billionaires list in 2010. Since, his estimated net worth has fluctuated between $1 billion and $2 billion, with it pegged at $1.4 billion as of June 2023. Lee Chin is well known in Ontario, Canada as a prolific car collector, specifically of Ferraris. His collection includes a LaFerrari, Ferrari 599 GTO, Ferrari F12tdf, and Ferrari Enzo. In 2021, Lee Chin took delivery of a 115.10m (377.6ft) Lürssen superyacht named Ahpo, worth an estimated US$354 million (CA$474 million). During its construction, Ahpo was known as Project Enzo, paying tribute to Lee Chin's love of Ferraris. In 2023, after just over one year of ownership, Lee Chin sold Ahpo to fellow Canadian billionaire Patrick Dovigi, who subsequently renamed the yacht to Lady Jorgia.

In 2003, he made headlines when he pledged to donate $30 million to the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) of which a third had been paid as of 2015. He also provided a $10 million gift to the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto. The gift established the Michael Lee Chin Family Institute for Corporate Citizenship at the Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto. The Lee Chin Institute's purpose is to help current and future business leaders integrate corporate citizenship into business strategy and practices. In September 2014, Lee Chin and his family donated $10 million to the Joseph Brant Hospital Foundation. Michael Lee Chin and family received the 2015 Association of Fundraising Professionals' (Golden Horseshoe Chapter) National Philanthropy Award in the category of Outstanding Philanthropist.

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, Jamaica went through a period of financial crisis. Lee Chin saw potential in his native country, and Portland purchased 75 per cent of the National Commercial Bank of Jamaica for 6 billion Jamaican dollars (US$127 million) from the Jamaican Government. In 2003, Senvia Money Services Inc., a global money transfer company, was established. This was followed in 2004, by the acquisition of AIC Financial Group Limited, headquartered in Trinidad. In 2004, he announced plans to set up the AIC Caribbean Fund with the intention of investing in the entire Caribbean region. The stated aim of the fund is to raise US$1 billion in order to "make investments in businesses located in countries of the Caribbean Community (CARICOM), with an emphasis on Jamaica, Barbados and Trinidad and Tobago". So far, it has made a number of large scale investments. In 2006, Portland acquired an 85 per cent controlling stake in the United General Insurance Company, the largest auto insurer in Jamaica, and renamed the firm Advantage General Insurance Company. A controlling interest in CVM Communications Group (consisting of radio and television stations and newspapers) was purchased at the same time. Portland partnered with the Canadian Risley Group to form Columbus Communications Ltd – a Barbadian corporation that holds controlling interest in a number of telecommunications providers in the Caribbean including Cable Bahamas Ltd, Caribbean Crossings Ltd, Merit Communications Ltd, and FibralLink Jamaica Ltd. In the tourism sector, Lee Chin guided Portland through a number of acquisitions in the Caribbean. Among them were the hospitality operations of the Trident Villas and Spa in Jamaica, Reggae Beach, and Blue Lagoon. Portland's first acquisition in the health care industry sector was announced in July 2006, when Medical Associates Ltd., a privately held hospital in Kingston, Jamaica, joined the Portland Group.

Similar to the experience of the late 1990s, Lee Chin again has shied away from investing in commodities and the energy market boom. He has specifically stated that "We [AIC] do not like commodities type businesses nor most high tech companies simply because they are implicitly poor enterprises which we would not want to hold for the long term". Again, this strategy has meant that AIC has significantly underperformed the S&P index, but Lee Chin stated in 2006 that he believed that the current boom is just another bubble. Lee Chin describes the market since 1990 as "a series of rolling speculations", and now "we see a commodities bubble".

While at Investors Group, he studied the strategies of successful investors, such as Warren Buffett, Benjamin Graham and Kenneth Thomson. Their buy and hold strategy is easily recognizable in the motto of AIC – Buy, hold and prosper. He also invested in public investment management businesses which benefit from a rising market in two ways. In a rising market stock in portfolios go up and more people become investors and increase existing investment.