Kindersley servicing company goes public

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SARAH MACMILLAN
of The Crossroads
Proud to serve West Central Saskatchewan and East Central Alberta
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Volume 36 • Issue 40 • Friday, October 4, 2013
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306-463-1766
Returning from Russia
Agnes Spicer was a well known figure in
Netherhill with a hidden past, a past that
involved belonging to the Soviet Red Army,
being a slave to Hitler and missing for 1,000
days during the Second World War, but
daughter Roxana Spicer is trying to reveal
this secret past through her documentary.
And in order to get to the truth, Roxana
went back to her mother’s roots, Russia.
Roxana, along with her one camera person, spent 14 days in Russia filming the
landscape that Agnes once called home and
interviewing the people who could give Roxana insight into her mother’s past.
“It was a very intense trip,” said
Roxana.
During the trip Roxana had to balance
being a journalist with being part of the
family, as she interviewed family members
for the film.
“I had to find a balance between getting
the story and being a pest,” said Roxana,
her family weary of the film and guarded
over what happened during the Second
World War. “They are of the mind some things are
better left unsaid, better unexplored,” she
said, one topic being the arrest of Roxana’s
grandmother, who was labeled a traitor of
the Soviet Union and imprisoned in a Gulag, not to be released until the beginning of
the Second World War.
Gulags were the Soviet Union’s labour
camps, detention and transit camps and
prisons that housed prisoners between
the 1920’s and 1950’s. Many of the camps
were corrective labour colonies which had
prisoners felling timber and doing general
construction, the people working in conditions with inadequate food, long hours and
a harsh climate. The Gulags held criminals
as well as political prisoners, those labeled
as traitors of the Soviet Union.
“In a way, the traitor’s daughter is not
only myself but also my mother,” said Roxana.
Agnes did not discover what had happened to her mother until she returned to
Russia for the first time in 1992.
“Keeping secrets in the Soviet Union
could mean the difference between staying
alive or not,” said Roxana, and though the
cities have changed, modernized, she says
the attitudes in rural Russia have remained
the same.
One of the reasons Roxana went to Russia was to interview the person she refers
to as ‘the last witness,’ her 88-year-old aunt
Nela. Roxana interviewed Nela for 10 to 15
minutes a day for a period of eight to nine
days, sometimes getting 30 seconds worth
of material she could use, other times getting two to three minutes of usable footage
“It was tricky,” Roxana said, interviewing her aunt. “I just had to be very respectful.”
Roxana says that her aunt has forgotten
some of the story details she was able to recall years ago.
“But that’s the nature of doing this type
of documentary,” said Roxana.
Roxana also interviewed her cousin Lena, who acted as the gatekeeper of the family information, notifying Roxana when she
had pushed a topic too far.
“I had to respect the boundaries that I
sensed they put in place,” said Roxana.
In total, Roxana, her camera person and
an interpreter spent 10 days in the Ural
Mountains, near the border of Siberia. To
get to Chusovoy, her mother’s hometown in
the mountains, Roxana flew from Moscow
to Perm and then took a bus through the
country side.
“Once you’re there you feel like Alice in
Wonderland,” said Roxana. “It’s a completely different place.”
During her 10 days, in addition to interviewing family, she also visited nearby historical and geographical sites including the
last Gulag, Perm 36, the concrete buildings
of the camp, which was established in 1946
as a logging camp, still standing.
“It’s actually the very last physical structure of that very evil,” said Roxana.
The crew was able to tour the prison
cells, which once housed approximately
2,000 prisoners who were made up of doctors, intellectuals, and others.
“That was quite an extraordinary day,”
said Roxana. Part of the footage shot at the
Gulag will be used for a Remembrance Day
program Roxana is writing and creating for
Global TV. While in the Ural Mountains Roxana and
her crew also visited the stone city, which
is not an actual city but a geological formation where pathways have been carved out
of deep, solid stone structures, and spent a
day along the river banks.
“We had a chance to really enjoy the landscape,” said Roxana, describing the rugged
landscape as being similar to Northern B.C.
“The physical landscape says something
about the people who live there and thrive
there.”
Though she says the landscape is beautiful, it also has a haunted feeling because of
its dark history. She is hoping to have captured that in her footage.
Prior to arriving in the Ural Mountains
and two days before her departure from the
country Roxana also filmed Moscow, planning to use the footage to show the difference between the city and the rural areas.
During the day they filmed ancient cathe-
ROXANA SPICER FOR THE CROSSROADS
Top left: Film maker Roxana Spicer poses near an original Soviet Union era building during her
recent trip to Russia. Above: Roxana in Moscow, standing before the building where she was doing
archival research on forced labor camps. Bottom Left: Agnes Spicer with sister Nela during Agnes’s
visit to Russia in 1992.
drals and the Stalin era subway system,
she also re-interviewed historical expert,
Irina Sherbakova who had originally broke
the news to Roxana that Agnes was quite
likely in Auschwitz.
“I had to go back and talk to her about
that again,” said Roxana
At night Roxana filmed the city, including the Red Square at midnight.
“It’s a city that’s so dramatic at night
time,” said Roxana. “You feel like you’re on
another planet.”
Roxana returned from her Russian film
shoot and search in August, immediately
going to work in the edit suite, putting together scenes.
Originally Roxana was planning on
hosting a screening of some of the Russian
footage as well as three documentary trail-
ers during the weekend of Goose Festival
in Kindersley, hoping to show supporters
what their support has helped to create.
Since beginning her project Roxana has
received letters, phone calls and emails
from people across the country voicing their
support and giving her encouragement.
She says just knowing that people are interested and intrigued by the story gives
her motivation, and through the screening
she wanted to acknowledge that she was
doing something with all that energy.
“I want them to feel like they’ve got a
front row seat on a project that’s really exciting,” said Roxana.
However, when Roxana returned to the
edit suite and began going over the material, she found that her material was multilayered.
“I didn’t think the material was going to
be as complex as it was,” Roxana said.
As she was sitting in the edit suite, Roxana began to notice things she had not seen
during the filming, items that changed the
direction of a scene. While filming Roxana
said she had the camera acting as a silent
partner. Instead of staging a scene she
waited to see what would unfold before her.
This technique lead to approximately six
different dramatic moments she noticed at
the time of filming, one which took place
outside the house Agnes was born in.
“Something happened in front of the
house that completely surprised me,” said
Roxana. The daughter of a woman who had
grown up with Agnes approached while
they were filming. The neighbour also gave
Roxana a new lead on her mother, one that
she is following up on.
“As a film maker you want to be really
open and responsive to what your material
is,” she said.
To help edit the documentary Roxana
has entered into a creative partnership
with documentary film maker and editor,
Michele Hozer, who has won two Gemini
Awards and a film which she co-directed
was short listed for an Oscar. Roxana and
Hozer have worked together previously, doing a film about the only homosexual high
school in Canada called “Class Queens,”
for CBC as well as a show called “Building
for Disaster” which was part of a series on
Discovery Channel called Frontiers of Construction.
See more ‘Russian
return’ cont’d on Page 5
Kindersley servicing company goes public
KENNETH BROWN
of The Crossroad
Good to Go Rentals Ltd. and Neigum Hot
Oilers Ltd. of Kindersley have been purchased by a group of investors and the new
operation would enter the realm of publicly
traded entities.
The qualifying transaction by DevCorp
Capital Inc. (TSX VENTURE:DCC.P) of
Good to Go Rentals Ltd. and Neigum Hot
Oilers Ltd. was announced back in June
and the company announced on Sept. 3 that
it has completed a previously announced
private placement, or offering, of 50 million
subscription receipts at 20 cents each for a
total of $10 million of aggregate gross proceeds.
Good to Go Rentals, an oilfield rental and
servicing company, and Neigum Hot Oilers,
otherwise known as Good to Go Trucking,
is an oilfield trucking company. DevCorp is
a capital pool company consisting of several
financial experts and other key investment
players.
Eight directors in total sit on the board
at DevCorp, along with two staff members
in Alex Jackson, the company’s chief financial officer (CFO), and Frank Sur, its corporate secretary. The board is led by Sidney
Dutchak, who’s DevCorp’s president, chief
executive officer and sitting director.
Norm Neigum, along with his wife Darla
Dorsett, established Neigum Hot Oilers in
1991 after 17 years working in the oil and
gas industry, and then the company expanded with Good to Go Rentals in 2005, a
move spurred on by rapid growth.
Neigum sits as one of the eight directors
on DevCorp’s board and he would also continue with the company as its general manager. Neigum and Dorsett are the majority
shareholders in DevCorp, but there are several investment opportunities for people to
own shares in the company.
Jackson, the company’s CFO, said in
an interview from September that the two
Kindersley companies represent the first
acquisition for DevCorp. Its transaction
would be the first of several made in Saskatchewan.
“Our end goal here is to build a Saskatchewan-wide service company that’s really focused on the four major oil producing
regions,” he said, referring to the four areas
such as Swift Current-Shaunavon, Estevan-Weyburn, Lloydminster and Kindersley-Kerrobert. “(Good to Go is) so well established in this marketplace already that
it really gives you a strong position to go
out and grow both through expansion, but
also through acquisition.”
The trading of DevCorp shares was halted when the acquisition was announced
early in the summer. The company is about
18 months old, but its founders had been
screening acquisition opportunities before
the transaction announcement in June.
Jackson said DevCorp’s founders and
board members have a long history of experience in exploration and production
companies, and the oil and gas servicing
industry, so it is fair to say that DevCorp’s
first acquisition was going to be an oil production or servicing company. It was noted
that the company chose to acquire Good to
Go because it fit with its overall strategy.
“It became apparent that (Neigum and
Dorsett) really were aligned in terms of
their business strategy, and what they
were wanting to do to grow their business,”
the CFO said. “That really married up well
with what we were hoping to do with a company that we would acquire.”
According to Jackson, DevCorp is the
name of the publicly traded company at
present and its officials are expecting the
name of the public company to change, but
they do not know what the name will be-
come or when it would be revealed.
DevCorp is the company that all other
companies would be acquired under. Company officials became aware of the Kindersley opportunity during the screening process whereby it was searching for an initial
acquisition.
Jackson said Neigum and Dorsett’s business advisor, Chris Doll of Saskatoon, knew
Dutchak, the DevCorp president, and he is
familiar with what everyone was trying to
do, so a discussion opened up between both
sides and a decision was made to acquire
the Good to Go businesses. It was important for DevCorp to keep the existing management in place.
“For us, it was critical that we had joining us a really strong management team
(that was) very operationally focused, (and)
hugely knowledgeable,” he explained, noting that the Good to Go owners have expertise in their line of business and the oil
industry in general. “It provided us with a
real solid foundation within which to continue to go out and evaluate and build our
business together. It was critical that they
were going to want to stay on with the business.”
The CFO referred to the news of Sept. 3
when the company announced that it had
raised the $10 million needed to close its
acquisition. He noted that there is a large
amount of available shares considered to be
“public float” not controlled by Neigum and
Dorsett.
Jackson said the share structure has created a balanced opportunity for the public to
own a piece of the company. He recognized
that as future acquisitions are made, more
shares would be added and made available.
He noted that the former owners have
bought into the concept because they believe in the company and the shared vision
at DevCorp. The Good to Go name is going
to be kept, along with the company’s most
valuable assets – its employees.
“We’re hugely excited with the quality
of the business, with (Neigum and Dorsett)
and their commitment and their vision
and as well, their employees,” he added.
“They’ve got a great group of people that
work there. They’re the biggest asset.”
Neigum said his move from private ownership to sitting as a director on a board of
individuals running a public business would
be business as usual for him. The Kindersley resident said he began by working in
top-level positions on drilling rigs and with
oil companies before he decided it was time
to start his own business. It led him to establish Neigum Hot Oilers in 1991.
“It was time we ran our own businesses,” he said, referring to the time when he
established his company. “We’d ran everybody else’s businesses for years, so it was
natural. This (change) is no different than
any of that stuff. We still have to run the
companies successfully and whatever else
we add to the plate. Sitting on the board, to
me, is no different than us having a safety
meeting with our (private) group of people.”
The DevCorp general manager said the
change would have benefits from a management and ownership perspective. Instead
of having to solve all the problems with
a small group of owners, he said there is
now a successful group of business people
to drawn on for their expertise and experience.
Neigum, who’s in charge of all company
operations, said he and Dorsett view the
change as a positive one for the company.
Aside from the obvious benefits for Good to
Go, he said a major reason for the change
was to give the company’s staff the chance
to benefit.
See more ‘Going public’ cont’d on Page 6