Doing business with the bear – Canadian Lawyer Magazine

March 23, 2015

When Canada introduced its first sanctions against Russia, back in March of 2014, it was the big players like Bombardier and Kinross Gold that landed on the radar screen.

Investors looked askance at Kinross, which has significant operations in Russia, even as the miner insisted that the new rules did not affect its business, and within months, plane and train maker Bombardier Inc. put a high profile $3.4 billion airplane assembly project on hold.

“It was a mixture of many things,” Daniel Desjardins, general counsel and corporate secretary for Quebec-based Bombardier, says of the decision not, for now, to go ahead with the project to assemble Bombardier’s Q400 turboprop planes in Russia. “Obviously the sanctions did affect the project, but also the state of the economy in Russia right now is a cause for the delay of the project. Right now we are pausing and we will stay tuned. And obviously if the environment changes, both from a sanctions point of view and from an economy point of view in Russia, we will start to reengage.”

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