Michael Lee-Chin

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 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 1965, Lee-Chin's first job came working as part of the landscaping team at the Frenchman's Cove Hotel.

The next year, he got a summer job working on the Jamaica Queen cruise ship, cleaning the engine room.

In 1970, he went to Canada on a scholarship program sponsored by the Jamaican government to study Civil Engineering at McMaster University, and graduated in 1974.

He financed his first year at university on his own but after that was able to attend on scholarship.

After graduating from McMaster, Lee-Chin worked briefly as a road engineer for the Jamaican government,

but unable to find work in his qualified field (and allegedly, because his Canadian wife did not like living in Jamaica), he returned to Canada where he began graduate studies in business.

At first he worked as a bouncer, but later found employment as a financial advisor for Investors Group.

Lee-Chin spent two years at the Investors Group, in the Hamilton, Ontario office and in 1979, moved to Regal Capital Planners and became regional manager.

In the late 1980s, AIC suffered from a collapse in the real estate market, in which it had invested.

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.

While at the company, in 1983, he secured a loan from the Continental Bank of Canada for C$800,000 to purchase a stake in Mackenzie Financial Group and formed Kicks Athletics with Andrew Gayle.

By 1987, the investment was worth C$3.5 million.

In 1987, Lee-Chin took the proceeds from his Mackenzie investment to buy a Kitchener-based company called the Advantage Investment Council (a division of AIC Limited) for $200,000.

At the time, the company had holdings of around C$800,000.

He renamed the company AIC, and developed it to a fund that controlled around C$6 billion, with hundreds of thousands of investors.

Following the acquisition of AIC Limited, Lee-Chin set up the Berkshire group of companies, comprising an investment planning arm, a securities dealership and an insurance operation.

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.

In 2000 and 2001, following the dotcom crash, AIC outperformed the market with 26 per cent growth and 4 per cent decline respectively.

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.

In November 2003, AIC was part of a regulatory investigation involving 105 Canadian mutual funds companies.

By 2007, Berkshire had amassed more than C$12 billion of assets under administration.

In 2007, Manulife acquired Berkshire from Portland Holdings in exchange for shares, making Portland one of the largest shareholders of Manulife.

In 2009, Lee-Chin sold AIC Limited to Manulife for an undisclosed amount.

The following year, Manulife rebranded the heritage AIC funds and eliminated the AIC name from the mutual fund line-up.

In addition to being the founder and Chairman of Portland Holdings Inc., Mr. Lee-Chin is chairman and director of Mandeville Holdings Inc. and Executive Chairman, CEO, and Portfolio Manager of Portland Investment Counsel Inc.

In 2016, Lee-Chin was appointed chairman of the government of Jamaica's Economic Growth Council (EGC).

Lee-Chin was appointed to the Order of Ontario in 2017.