When it comes to land holdings in the oil sands, nobody has a bigger stake in the region than the Koch brothers.
Around Peace River the American billionaires own an amount of land greater than the size of Los Angeles. They are the oil patches largest foreign investor with more than a million acres, more than oil giant Shell Canada has.
Koch presence in Canada
map courtesy; The Star
For the past four decades the Koch’s have been growing their massive fortune in Canada’s oil industry, making an estimated $115-billion dollars last year alone. That’s according to Forbes magazine.
Its oil sands interests are top-to-toe, from leasing and selling holdings for prospective development to exploring, drilling and mining bitumen, to marketing and exporting oil to the U.S. through its own and other pipelines, to selling lucrative byproducts.
The Koch brothers, Charles and David are singled out by opponents as the First Family of Feckless Greed, enemies of democracy and the environment. The use of their wealth to support their radically libertarian goals in the interest of unfettered free enterprise has changed America’s political landscape.
The media firewall around Koch’s Alberta oil offices comes as no surprise. The company’s private status tells nosy competitors, as well as reporters, “Keep out. That means you.”
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