Seven children, five mothers, a former spouse and an estate worth ‘hundreds of millions’: a look at the court battle over cigarette baron Ken Hill’s mysterious will

An Ontario Superior Court judge has ordered Ohsweken-based Grand River Enterprises to turn over financial documents to a group of women and children who are challenging the will of Ken Hill, the deceased co-founder of GRE.

Hill, a burly businessman with a love of expensive cars and boats, died unexpectedly in January 2021 in Miami, Fla., at age 62.

He owned 12.5 per cent of the shares of GRE, which describes itself as the “largest private Indigenous-owned company in the world.”

Hill was not married at the time of death, but he was survived by nine children from at least five women, according to the court decision, which was released in December.

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Peterborough And Area News

• Dec 31, 1969
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Peterborough And Area News

• Dec 31, 1969
• Comments

Three of Hill’s children were adults when he died. A fourth was a minor who is now an adult. The other five are still minors.

Seven of Hill’s children, five of the mothers of the dependent children, and a former spouse are now seeking support from Hill’s estate.

But first, the court has to untangle a couple of mysteries.

One is the will itself, which suddenly “appeared out of nowhere,” according to Justice Cory Gilmore’s December ruling. The other is the size of Hill’s estate.

At stake is a vast amount of money.

Even the judge notes the estate could be “worth hundreds of millions of dollars,” depending on the value of Hill’s stake in the cigarette company.

A five-day trial is scheduled for September to hear the challenge of Hill’s will.

In addition to requiring the cigarette company to produce its financial records, the judge also ordered in December that Hill’s lawyer and Jerry Montour, one of GRE’s co-founders, were required to sit for examinations under oath led by one of the lawyers for the mothers and children.

Montour is a longtime close friend and business partner with Hill in a number of ventures dating back decades.

Montour has said in a court affidavit for this case that he was unwittingly in possession of Hill’s will at the time he died, something the will’s challengers want to explore further.

In a span of just over a decade, Hill and Montour took GRE from a cramped steel building on one of Six Nations’ concession roads in the early 1990s to a modern factory in Ohsweken that was 25 times the size.

GRE is a rarity among Canada’s Indigenous cigarette makers. In 1996, the company incorporated under Canadian law in exchange for a licence to manufacture and sell cigarettes, and GRE pays all required excise taxes and duties.

That decision has caused friction on Six Nations.

“Some members of the Six Nations community are unhappy with GRE’s position on regulatory compliance,” Gilmore stated in her December ruling, “and are vehemently opposed to it paying any taxes to the Canadian government.”

Montour stated it even more clearly in a 2008 interview with The Spectator.

“Sellout,” Montour said he’s called by fellow Indigenous people. “And you know what? I am. I very clearly am. It’s hurtful, but it’s truthful.”

GRE is now one of Canada’s largest exporters of tobacco products.

A Spectator investigation in 2006 provided a glimpse for the first time of the vast holdings and enormous wealth of GRE and its owners.

One court document obtained by The Spectator indicated GRE’s cigarette sales for 2005 alone were in the range of $300 million.

In the decade from 1996 to 2005, the company paid $400 million just in Canadian excise taxes.

Outside of Canada, GRE was selling the equivalent of six million cigarettes a day in the U.S. by 2004. On top of that was a reported $70-million deal to supply cigarettes to the German army.

The company was also reportedly shipping cigarettes to Italy, Belgium, France, Sweden, Denmark, Uruguay and South Africa.

At one point, the investigation revealed, GRE was selling 2.2 billion cigarettes a year in the mid-2000s — 70 cigarettes a second.

On top of that, the Spectator investigation also revealed that Hill and Montour were connected to various other businesses, including gas bars, internet gaming, construction, a bottled water company, and a proposed mining operation in northern Saskatchewan.

GRE’s own website states it manufactures and distributes its products “across more than 50 countries and five continents.”

At the time of his death, Hill was involved in a nasty, protracted family court fight with the mother of one of his children, now involved in the will challenge.

Brittany Beaver had spent six years fighting to obtain spousal support and child support for the son she had with Hill in 2009.

But Hill had employed what Ontario’s Court of Appeal called “a scorched earth approach to every step of this case,” and he was very nearly hit with an abuse of process ruling, according to the Appeal Court’s ruling.

The Six Nations businessman attempted to have the case thrown out of court with a novel argument. He stated that Ontario’s Family Law Act shouldn’t apply to him because it infringed on his Indigenous rights.

That argument was rejected completely and repeatedly, first at family court, then by the Court of Appeal in 2019, and finally a year later at the Supreme Court of Canada, which refused to hear the case.

Much like the current case against the estate, Beaver had been trying to get the court to force Hill to provide full financial disclosure for the purpose of establishing support payments to her and her son.

Some of the assets Beaver claimed Hill owned included the following: a restaurant in Fort Erie, a pizza place, a café, a spa, the MontHill golf course south of Caledonia, two Ferraris, four Rolls-Royces, two Bentleys, two Range Rovers, several Mercedes, several BMWs, a private plane, an 80-foot yacht, a 70-foot speedboat, up to 20 motorcycles and as many as 10 all-terrain vehicles.

Beaver and her son are part of the group now challenging the will.

The December ruling by Gilmore in the will challenge case notes that Hill also owned other unspecified businesses in the U.S. and the Bahamas.

According to Gilmore’s ruling, the value of Hill’s estate currently sits at $56 million, not counting the value of his GRE shares. Hill received $2 million from GRE in 2017, and his estate is owed payments of $2 million for both 2018 and 2019, $4 million for 2020, $7 million for 2021, and an estimated $6 million for 2022. The payment for 2023 has not yet been determined.

Those who are contesting Hill’s will say it came to light under “suspicious circumstances,” according to Gilmore’s ruling, and that it makes no sense, given the size and complexity of Hill’s financial holdings.

In an affidavit, Montour stated he was unaware that Hill had made a will.

But after Hill’s death, his lawyer reached out to Montour and reminded him that Hill had given Montour an envelope shortly before his death, requesting him to deliver it to his lawyer if anything should happen to him, according to Montour’s affidavit.

After the reminder, Montour found the envelope and saw it was unsealed. He “opened it and saw the title ‘will’ at the top,” the judge stated. “He did not read it but arranged to have it delivered.”

The one-page document is dated Sept. 10, 2020, about four months before Hill died.

In it, Hill names his son, Ryan Burnham, as the executor of the estate.

He then states that five of the children who were minors will each receive $5 million, and the son he had with Beaver will receive $3 million. His one adult daughter was not named at all in the will.

“If I do not have enough money to make these payments, then my executor should sell some of my property to make the payments,” the will states.

Hill then left all of his shares in GRE to Burnham. “But I want Ryan to give 50 per cent of the money that comes from those shares to my son Joshua Hill or hold that money for Joshua as Ryan thinks is needed.”

Hill then directed that the rest of his property and land should also go to Burnham, with the same proviso that he should give “50 per cent of the money that comes from the use or sale of that property and land to my son Joshua Hill or hold that money for Joshua as Ryan thinks is needed.”

And that was the entirety of the will.

The mothers and children contesting the will have told court the signature on the will is suspicious and it wasn’t witnessed by anyone.

They also state the will makes no sense because GRE’s own rules among its owners stipulate ownership shares can’t be sold on the open market and can’t be transferred without the approval of the majority of the company’s directors or shareholders.

They say that means Hill can’t just bequeath his 12.5 per cent stake in GRE to his son because it might not be approved by the other owners.

A lawyer for GRE did not respond to a request for comment or to confirm that the financial documents have been released to those contesting the will. The judge’s order stipulated the information had to be turned over within 30 days of the Dec. 21 ruling.

A lawyer for Montour did not respond to a request for comment or to confirm that Montour was examined under oath. The order gave Montour 60 days from Dec. 21 to comply.

The judge indicated she would be prepared to keep GRE’s financial information confidential until after the trial, if the company wished. After the conclusion of the trial, GRE could apply for a sealing order to keep competitors from gaining access to the information.

Steve Buist is a former investigative reporter at the Hamilton Spectator.