“For years, they’ve talked up his appetite for risk with headlines that sometimes made him more myth than man. They’re now just as prolifically vocal in detailing his fall from billionaire status, with almost salacious asides about his lost luxury lifestyle.”

There’s a distinct Atlantic Canadian irony to John Risley’s current financial woes. The man who launched one of the region’s most famous entrepreneurial journeys by selling lobsters from the back of a pickup truck is now being gleefully pulled back into the pot.

For those who don’t know—though I really can’t fathom how you can possibly live in Atlantic Canada and not know Risley’s story—his name is synonymous with business bravado. From youthful mobile shellfish vendor to co-founder of Clearwater Seafoods, his career shows an almost preternatural instinct for empire building. He helped grow Clearwater into one of North America’s largest verti-cally integrated seafood companies, then sold it for a billion dollars in 2021. He was also the driving force behind Ocean Nutrition, a Nova Scotia-based company that became the world’s largest producer of Omega-3 fatty acids—he sold that for $540 million in 2012. And he was a major investor in Columbus Communications, a telecommunications and cable company in the Caribbean that grew from one country and two employees to 42 countries and 3,200 staff. When it merged with Cable and Wireless Communications PLC in 2014, Risley’s holding company—CFFI—received $650 million in shares and $350 million in cash.

 

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