The largest shareholder in high-end mall owner Macerich Co. sold its entire holding for nearly $500 million when the stock soared after being touted on Reddit, Bloomberg News reported. Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan sold 24.56 million shares on Wednesday at an average price of $20.25 a share, according to details in an amended 13D. The Canadian fund had owned 16.4% of the company, according to data complied by Bloomberg.

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American affiliates of Canadian restaurant business Yatsen Group sought Chapter 15 recognition in Delaware bankruptcy court, saying COVID-19 has ravaged its business and left its locations unable to pay rent, Law360 reported. Yatsen Group of Companies Inc., SAR Real Estate Inc. and 36 affiliates filed their petition late Monday, while a foreign, main case proceeds in Canada.

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President Biden’s revocation of a permit for TC Energy Corp.’s Keystone XL pipeline is raising pressure on Canada’s energy industry to seek new markets for oil and gas, its top export, the Wall Street Journal reported. Biden revoked the Keystone XL permit last Wednesday, hours after taking office, effectively shutting down a 12-year, cross-border project that would have carried 830,000 barrels a day from Alberta to Nebraska and eventually to refiners on the Gulf Coast. His executive order, which fulfilled a campaign promise, cited concerns about climate change.

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Canada’s unemployment rate in December was revised to 8.8% from 8.6% on Monday, while the net decline in jobs for the month was amended to 52,700 from 62,600, as Statistics Canada completed a historic review of its labor force data, Reuters reported. The revision, undertaken to ensure the data was aligned with recent population and geographical boundary estimates, had “virtually no effect” on employment estimates for the pandemic period of March to December 2020, the agency said.

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U.S. President Joe Biden on Wednesday formally revoked the permit needed to build the Keystone XL oil pipeline (KXL), dashing Ottawa’s hopes of salvaging the $8 billion project that the struggling Canadian crude sector has long supported, Reuters reported. The move represents another set-back for the beleaguered Canadian oil industry, in particular its energy heartland Alberta, kills thousands of jobs, and marks an early bump in Biden’s relationship with Canada, a key trading partner.

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Kimmeridge Energy Management Co. said it’s prepared to nominate directors to the board of Ovintiv Inc. if the oil and gas producer fails to take the necessary steps to improve its performance and restore investor confidence, Bloomberg News reported. The private equity firm, which said it owns a 2.4% stake in Ovintiv, argues in a new 18-page presentation that the company is falling behind its peers as a result of its misguided spending, expensive acquisitions, poor governance and inadequate environmental stewardship.

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Toronto-Dominion Bank will defend itself in a trial starting in a Canadian court on Monday in which liquidators of the collapsed Antigua bank of former Texas financier Robert Allen Stanford are seeking $5.5 billion in damages, Reuters reported. The joint liquidators of Stanford International Bank (SIB) allege “negligence and knowing assistance” by TD, Canada’s second-biggest lender, in allowing SIB to maintain correspondent accounts, according to a statement filed with the Ontario Superior Court of Justice in 2019.
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As the code red lockdown continues past the holiday season, the pulse of Winnipeg small business is growing weak despite injections of government survival cash. Jonathan Alward, director of provincial affairs for the Manitoba branch of the Canadian Federation of Independent Business (CFIB) told the Winnipeg Sun on Tuesday that many Winnipeg small businesses are considering bankruptcy.

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DesRosiers Automotive Consultants Inc. says that 1.54 million cars and trucks were sold in Canada in 2020, falling 19.7 per cent from 2019 to the lowest level since 2009, the Canadian Press reported. The consultancy says auto sales fell 2.6 per cent in December 2020 from the same month in 2019, leaving dealers in the midst of the steepest annual decline since 1982. But it also says that it could have been worse, given sales plummeted 75 per cent for the month of April at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.
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The Canada Pension Plan Investment Board (CPPIB) was the unlucky recent buyer of a 5 percent stake in SolarWinds, the Texas-based business software maker that was compromised by a far-reaching Russian espionage attack discovered this month, the Washington Post reported. The largest shareholders in SolarWinds agreed to sell CPPIB the stake for $315 million on Dec. 7, just days before tech company’s public disclosure of the hack crushed its stock price more than 20 percent.

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