MONTREAL — A trio of Montreal-based businessmen who promised to revolutionize talk radio in the city are looking for foreign financing to help get their AM radio stations off the ground, almost eight years after their first licence was awarded by the CRTC.
In a video posted to LinkedIn this month, partner Nicolas Tétrault (pictured in a screen cap from that video), a real estate agent who recently went through a personal bankruptcy, complained that there is "no financing available for radio stations" in Quebec. “The banks, they don’t lend to media, private funds don’t lend, pensions … no funds are available.”
In its 2011 application to the CRTC, the group said it had a $21-million loan available from James Edward Capital Corporation and $1.5 million from each of the three partners.
In the video, Tétrault, also said broadcasting regulations make it "extremely complicated, ten times more than in the U.S." to enter the Canadian radio market. He focused on the lack of ownership diversity in the Montreal market, where Bell Media and Cogeco Media own most of the commercial stations and have a combined commercial market share above 95% in both languages.
"If any of you are interested in investing in Quebec, to have an influence on society," he said, "there's a unique opportunity. Contact me and we can talk about it."
He then said CRTC ownership rules allow up to 30% of a broadcasting company to be owned by non-Canadians, and through tags attached to the post suggested he was seeking investment from countries including the United States, United Kingdom, France, India, Israel and the Cayman Islands.
(The rule is actually that 20% of a licensee can be owned by non-Canadians, or one-third of a parent corporation where that company and its directors "do not exercise control or influence over any programming decisions of the subsidiary corporation.")
7954689 Canada Inc., doing business as TTP Media, is owned in equal parts by Tétrault (through a bankruptcy-protected family trust), Paul Tietolman and Rajiv Pancholy. Paul Tietolman is the son of Jack Tietolman, who founded Montreal radio station CKVL in 1946. Pancholy is a former chief executive at mobile companies Microcell Telecom, Mitec Telecom, TenXc Wireless and India's OnMobile, and before that a vice-president at Nortel.
None of the three partners responded to requests for an interview about the video. Tétrault's video says Pancholy is his partner but does not mention Tietolman at all.
Tietolman and Tétrault first made waves in 2010 when they attempted to usurp the $80-million sale of Corus Entertainment's Quebec radio stations to Cogeco by submitting an $81-million competing bid. A year later, with Pancholy, they joined a competition for two open clear-channel AM frequencies in Montreal. They won one of them, at 940 kHz, for a French talk station, and in 2012 got a licence for an English talk station at 600 kHz.
Though the stations formally launched in 2016 and 2017 after major delays and several extensions, they are running automated music playlists and haven't hired one of the more than 100 employees they promised to.
The group also was one of 22 applicants in 2012 to take over 88.1 FM in Toronto after it was vacated by Ryerson University station CKLN-FM, a competition eventually won by Rock 95 Broadcasting's Indie 88. And it was one of 11 applicants for new radio stations in Calgary in 2012, a competition won by Pattison's Wild 95.3.
TTP Media's two Montreal radio stations (it also got a third licence for a French sports station at 850 AM, but abandoned it for technical reasons) had their licences renewed in 2018 and 2019, both are short-term renewals to 2023. Neither licence has any special conditions related to programming.
