A man who fleeced farmers in Manitoba for millions of dollars may soon be facing personal bankruptcy himself.
A creditor in Ontario has taken a rare step to try and put Arlan Galbraith, the man at the centre of a multi-million dollar pigeon-farming scheme, into personal bankruptcy.
Galbraith ran Pigeon King International, a company that sold hundreds of farmers across Canada on the idea of raising common pigeons for profit.
The company later collapsed and farmers who invested found themselves saddled with huge debts and barns filled with birds.
Fred Clement, a farmer in Rossburn Manitoba, spent $250,000 on birds from Pigeon King and on fixing-up his barn.
It was an investment he thought was going to make him millions.
"I looked through it and everything looked fairly promising," Clement told CTV News.
Pigeon King told investors they were raising birds for racing in Saudi Arabia, then as squab, a replacement for chicken.
Clement bought a thousand breeding pairs and he was promised $25 for every pigeon sold back to the company. At first it made money. But alarm bells were ringing.
Pigeon King was recruiting more and more farmers; but how many pigeons did the company have a market for?
As it turned out not many -- if any at all.
The company collapsed into bankruptcy, leaving farmers out an estimated $20 million.
Galbraith claims he had plans for a pigeon processing plant, but that he didn't have any "firm contracts" from buyers.
Yet documents obtained by W-Five show that Galbraith's personal company, Sacred Dove Ranch, was paid $2 million. And as Pigeon King's only shareholder, he also took hundreds of thousands of dollars from the company before the bankruptcy.
Now his only advice to the farmers he left in the lurch is to gas their birds and bury them.
For Fred Clement with 30,000 thousand pigeons and a feed bill of hundreds of dollars a day, the choice is sadly clear.
With a report from CTV's Victor Malarek.
