Bad news for Ruby Liu and her Bay 2.0 master plan
The billionaire’s purchase of 25 former Hudson’s Bay stores was blocked by a judge
A wrench has been thrown into the grand plans of Ruby Liu. The Chinese billionaire who is trying to buy up Hudson’s Bay Company leases was informed by a judge on Friday that her $69-million purchase of 25 Bay locations would not proceed as she’d hoped.
Shortly after HBC filed for creditor protection and closed its stores earlier this year, Liu, a real estate mogul, was granted permission to take over three Bay locations, which she envisioned as high-end eponymous department stores with dining, entertainment and children’s spaces. Liu owns the shopping malls where these three stores are located.
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According to the Financial Post, however, Liu’s further expansion was blocked by an Ontario judge last week, after several commercial landlords questioned her ability to run the stores. The case went to court in August.
“The overall lack of experience at the leadership level represents a significant risk to the operational viability of launching and managing 25 large department stores in the contemplated timeline,” said Ontario Superior Court Justice Peter Osborne in his decision. “The composition of the proposed senior leadership team for the purchaser gives me significant concern.”
Liu’s purchase would have contributed $50 million toward the reported $950 million the Bay owes to creditors and would have created around 1,800 jobs throughout the country, according to the Post.
Alas, a lawyer representing the opposing landlords told the court that having an “unsuitable, inappropriate anchor tenant” would be worse than leaving the former Bay stores vacant.
Carly Lewis is a journalist whose work has appeared in the New York Times and the New York Times Magazine, Vanity Fair, Wired, Interview Magazine, Pitchfork, Elle, and Maclean’s, where she is a contributing editor. Her work has been recognized by the National Magazine Awards and the Digital Publishing Awards. She reports on city life, culture—including what people do online—politics, art and crime. She received the Dave Greber Freelance Writers Award for “The Murder of Ashley Wadsworth,” an investigative feature about a Canadian teenager who was killed by a man she met on social media, published by Maclean’s.
