The secret life of Canadian oil tycoon Scott Saxberg

financialpost.com:

The basement of Scott Saxberg’s childhood home in Winnipeg was emblematic of a mid-1970s’ household whose most senior member, Mervyn, played a ton of hockey, as did his two sons.

Smelly gear lay strewn about the washing machine, along with a vintage Second World War Canadian army duffel bag that Mervyn used as a hockey bag. The bag had belonged to Mervyn’s uncle Ardagh Cadieu, who was a near-mythic figure in family circles and someone Mervyn only really knew through stories others told about him, stories he shared with his boys.

These fragmented yarns of Cadieu, who went off to war, lodged in the imagination of Scott, Mervyn’s youngest child, even as he got older and started dreaming of things beyond playing for the Boston Bruins.

Foremost among those adult pastimes was striking out on his own as an oilpatch entrepreneur and co-founding Calgary-based Crescent Point Energy Corp. (now Veren Inc.) in 2001. Saxberg grew the company that started with two employees into Canada’s fourth-largest oil and gas producer before resigning in 2018 after 15 years as the publicly traded outfit’s chief executive, a departure cushioned by an $18-million severance package.

He then started his own private company, Cache Island Corp., with some old oilpatch pals, and has lately returned to drilling grade-A wells in an area of southern Saskatchewan previously thought to not be conducive to drilling such wells and directing the resulting oil revenues into building solar farms in Alberta.

These include a $150-million development that Cache Island sold to a Spanish energy company for a hefty, undisclosed sum. Saxberg also recently bought a minority stake in a second-division German soccer team for a similarly undisclosed sum after previously