Billionaire media magnate Ken Thomson dead at 82

Billionaire Ken Thomson, Canada’s richest person whose worldwide business empire once included the Canadian newspaper chain founded by his father, has died at age 82, the Globe and Mail reported today.

Thomson, who owned about 70% of the Thomson Corp, ranked ninth on the Forbes magazine list of the world’s wealthiest individuals, with an estimated fortune of $19.6bn .

Thomson became chairman of the global information group after the death of his father, Roy, in 1976, and turned the chairmanship over to his son, David, in 2002. He remained on the board of Thomson Corp. and headed the Woodbridge Co., his family’s private investment company.

His vast and varied international holdings once included the Times of London and North Sea oilfields.

Under his watch, Thomson Corp. shed most of its newspapers in the 1990s as it converted itself into a highly-profitable online data provider.

North Sea oil revenues enabled Thomson to buy 76% of Hudson’s Bay Co. in 1979 and, a year later, FP Publications – parent of the Toronto Globe and Mail and several mid-sized papers.

Until the purchase of the Globe, which styles itself Canada’s national newspaper, Thomson’s Canadian dailies had been in small communities. Today, Bell Globemedia, which Thomson formed with BCE Inc., owns the Globe and CTV Inc., a Canadian television network.

Author Peter Newman, who interviewed the billionaire for a 1991 book, found Thomson did not take pleasure in his career.

“That’s the strange part of it,” Newman wrote in Merchant Princes. “He’s not a very happy man. He doesn’t enjoy life, with the exception of his art.” And that he loved.

His Canadian collection alone was appraised at $18m (€14.3m). Thomson owned more than 200 paintings by Dutch-Canadian artist Cornelius Krieghoff.

Few had a chance to spot the canvases – Thomson and his wife, Marilyn, rarely entertained at their 23-room mansion in an exclusive Toronto neighbourhood. Visitors to his 25th-floor office were routinely screened ahead of time.

Thomson adored his outgoing and colourful father, who became a British peer and, on his death in 1976, passed to his son the title Lord Thomson of Fleet.

Kenneth Thomson did not use his title in Canada and never took up his seat in the British House of Lords.

In a 1980 interview, Thomson said: “I lead a schizophrenic existence almost to a humorous extent. In London, I’m Lord Thomson, in Toronto I’m Ken.”

“I’m honouring a promise to my father by being Lord Thomson and at the same time I can just be Ken.”

Unlike his father, who craved recognition for scrabbling his way up from nothing, Thomson seemed determined to play down his wealth and stay out of the public eye.