Ken Hill, Grand River Enterprises co-founder, dead at age 62
Six Nations businessman Ken Hill, co-founder of the Grand River Enterprises cigarette company, died on the weekend during a visit to Miami, Fla.
Hill, who was 62, and business partner Jerry Montour of Hamilton turned GRE into a global player in the cigarette market, with annual sales that may have exceeded $300 million by the mid-2000s, according to a 2006 Spectator investigation.
Aside from GRE, Hill had been involved in a number of different ventures - the Wahta Springs bottled water company, a construction company, the Brantford Golden Eagles junior hockey team, and a gas bar and convenience store at Six Nations, among others.
In 2014, Hill and Montour bought Sundrim Golf Course on Highway 6 south of Caledonia and turned it into the high-end MontHill Golf and Country Club.
He was a strong Six Nation community supporter, involved in a number of charitable initiatives and local businesses," GRE president Steve Williams said in a statement. We, his Grand River Enterprises family, would like to extend our condolences to his family and ask for privacy for the family at this time."
The statement notes that Hill was active in GRE's U.S. and European markets, including GRE Germany.
In a span of just over a decade, Hill and Montour took GRE from a cramped steel building on one of Six Nations' concession roads in the early 1990s to a modern, gleaming factory that was 25 times the size.
By 2006, GRE had signed a reported $70-million deal to be the official supplier of cigarettes to the German army, the first foreign company to win a contract with Germany's Ministry of Defence.
At one point in the mid-2000s, according to the Spectator's investigation, GRE was selling 2.2 billion cigarettes a year - 70 cigarettes per second.
But the company was also embroiled in a number of lawsuits, particularly in the U.S. where GRE fought claims it was engaged in the contraband cigarette trade.
In 2009, Hill was charged with 16 counts by the state of Washington for trafficking in contraband cigarettes but the following year, a jury found him not guilty on all counts.
In recent years, Hill had been fighting an acrimonious, expensive, high-profile child and spousal support case with Brittany Beaver, the mother of their son.
Beaver has been seeking $85,701 a month in spousal support, just over $33,000 a month in child support and 100 per cent of their child's expenses, retroactive in each case to the date of their separation in 2013, according to court documents.
Hill attempted to have the case tossed out of court on the grounds that Ontario's Family Law Act infringed on his Indigenous rights. He lost the argument, then lost an appeal and then unsuccessfully tried to take the case to the Supreme Court of Canada, which refused to hear the case.
In the interim, Hill had been ordered to pay Beaver hundreds of thousands of dollars in court costs alone.
As part of the court case, Hill indicated in 2017 that he earned an income of $2,109,504 per year, which was not subject to income tax.
The Spectator's 2006 investigation also showed Hill had accumulated significant landholdings at Six Nations of approximately 172 hectares of reserve land that had been acquired in about 20 transactions.
Steve Buist is a Hamilton-based investigative reporter at The Spectator. Reach him via email: sbuist@thespec.com