The Decibel - Why a B.C. billionaire’s bid for Hudson’s Bay stores failed

Episode Date: November 17, 2025

In May, a B.C. billionaire named Weihong (Ruby) Liu made a $69.1-million deal to acquire 28 leases of former Hudson’s Bay stores. Her company, Central Walk, owned malls where three of those stores were located, so those leases went unopposed; however, landlords of the other 25 stores were skeptical of her ability to operate her proposed stores. She had cash, real estate experience, and a vision — but no experience running a major retailer.Susan Krashinsky Robertson is the Globe’s retailing reporter. She’s been covering the fallout from the demise of Canada’s oldest retailer. Today, she’s on the show to talk about what she learned about Ruby Liu over the course of the hearings, and why her bid to take over 25 more stores ultimately failed.Questions? Comments? Ideas? Email us at [e-mail] Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

So Weihong Yu, who goes by the name Ruby, came on the scene back in May when she made a deal to acquire 28 leases of former Hudson's Bay stores in a deal worth about $69 million. That's Susan Krishinsky Robertson, the Globe's retailing reporter. She's talking about a BC billionaire who bid on lucrative retail leases of former Hudson's Bay stores. These leases have value to them because, you know, historically, department stores were actually very important retailers when they acted as anchor tenants, drawing shoppers in. And as a result of that, the leases that they signed would be very different from what other retailers in a mall would be able to get. And they included some really attractive conditions. I'm thinking about things like below market rents, the rights to renew those leases, sometimes very far into the future. We're talking decades.

And also, in some cases, the rights to approve or disapprove of developments that the landlords might want to do in the mall. The problem is, the landlords didn't want Ruby Liu to take over these leases. That's because, although her real estate company owned malls, she had no experience running retail, not to mention retail of this size. Susan has been covering the fallout from the Bay's demise, and in the process, she's learned a lot about Ruby's history, her business dealings, and her failed attempt to take over those bay leases. I reviewed hundreds of pages of legal documents, and what our examination of this case found was just examples of some unusual conduct on the part of Ruby Lou and her team, even beyond some of the details that were made public during the course of this legal battle.

Today, Susan is on the show to tell us what she learned. I'm Cheryl Sutherland, and this is the decibel from the great. Loeb and Mail. Hi, Susan. Thanks so much for being here. Thanks for having me. So, Susan, today we're diving deep into a woman named Ruby Liu. And we did an episode about her bids takeover some of the bay leases back in July.

But since then, you've learned so much more about who she is and her business dealings. And it is quite the tale. Before we get into it, I want to start by asking you about her ideas. When she first signed the deal to acquire the Bay's leases, what was her vision? Yeah, so when Ruby first signed this deal, what she had said at the time was that she wanted to essentially revive the Bay. In fact, the name that she was using for the stores she wanted to launch was New Bay. That very quickly became problematic because, of course, also in May, a deal was reached with Canadian Tire to sell off the Bay's intellectual property. So that means its brands, its name, its logos, those stripes that we know so well that are associated with the brand.

That all went to Canadian Tire in a $30 million deal. We know that Ms. Liu was also bidding on the IP and really wanted that, but she was outbid by Canadian Tire. And so very quickly she had to pivot away from her plan to call it New Bay, which would have obviously introduced some legal issues. And she decided instead that she wanted to launch a chain of department stores, named after herself. So named Ruby Liu. She also started appearing in public or on social media holding up these signs like with a printout, right, of this red gemstone of like the logo that she wanted to use for the Ruby Liu stores, I guess. Yes, that's after she changed the name. So that that logo that she would appear with started appearing all over the place. She had it

silk screened onto shirts that eventually some of her supporters would show up to court wearing. She would hold up, as I say printouts when she was doing social media. She had signs. and had created a logo that she wanted to use using a red gemstone in her name for what the stores would look like. Okay, interesting. So she had some interesting ideas here. And I want to kind of go back to the beginning to find out, like, who is Ruby Liu? So what do we know about what her upbringing was like? So Ruby Liu was born in 1966 in Harbin, China.

And we know some of this detail through her own affidavit that she submitted with the court, as well as some letters that she sent to the judge in the case, which we will get to later. But also my colleague, James Griffiths, our Hong Kong-based reporter, and Alexander Lee in Beijing, did some additional research into some of her background. And what we know is that she grew up quite poor, actually. She had said in court documents that she was born and raised in what she described essentially as a shack. And her mother worked very long hours in a factory. From a very young age, she was working.

She helped to sell through a wholesale business, clothing and other items, and then left school in high school to help her family to earn money. And so they grew a wholesale business, and she sold that eventually in her early 20s and moved to Shenzhen, which is where she really built her success. There she started out with a small soda shop in a bus station. She turned to investing in restaurants, according to Chinese language media reports. She also turned her focus, of course, to real estate. And real estate ended up being really the source of her wealth. She partnered on a housing development in the early aughts and also invested the equivalent of roughly $130 million Canadian in a joint venture to develop a huge shopping center in Shenzhen's central business district. and she eventually sold that shopping center to another company for more than a billion dollars.

Wow, that's incredible. Yes. And so that's how she made her money. She also did some real estate speculation. She told a Chinese language interviewer at one point that she bought up properties that had fallen in value during the great economic crisis and later resold them at a profit. And so this was some of the background of how she built her wealth before coming to Canada. Do we know how much she's worth today? She has said that her personal net worth exceeds $1 billion.

And in the course of this legal process, she did submit some proof of money that she has in some of her accounts. So certainly we know she has liquid assets in the amount of a few hundred million dollars for sure. She also owns some properties in Canada, although it's unclear just how much those are worth. And so we know that she has quite a lot of money, certainly, to. fund a business venture should she decide to spend it. Okay. Susan, what do we learn about her businesses back in China? So she obviously had quite a lot of success, but the mall development in particular was also the subject of some controversy. So in February of 2012, the Shenzhen Business Daily published an investigation into leasing practices at that mall, which was called

Yi Jing Central Walk. Prospective buyers said that they had paid for properties they never received. and were unable to get a refund. And according to Chinese media reports, there was a press conference where some of those investors showed up with banners reading things like Return My Hard-Earned money. Ms. Liu blamed her banking partners and other partners for that situation and said the money would be refunded. But during that press conference, there was an incident which also arose in court documents. Ms. Liu apparently refused to answer questions from the

reporter from that publication that broke the investigation. And when that reporter followed her to attempt to ask her questions, Ms. Liu allegedly punched her in the chest and knocked her to the floor. What? So she later apologized, according to media reports, but continued to deny wrongdoing in that controversy. And she talked about it actually during the legal fight over the Bay stores. She posted a video on Chinese language social media. in September, claiming that reporter had been part of what she called an evil group who were attempting to seize the shopping mall. And in court documents, she stated that it was that incident that convinced her to leave China. Interesting. And she came to Canada in 2014.

So Ruby comes to Canada in the mid-2010s. She moves to Vancouver. What do we know about her businesses here in Canada? So after moving to Vancouver, she continued to invest in commercial real estate. So she has a company called Central Walk, and Central Walk acquired a number of shopping malls in British Columbia, the Mayfair Shopping Center in Victoria, Tawasin Mills, just south of Vancouver, and the Woodgrove Center in Animo. And she also owns the Arbitus Ridge Golf Club just outside Victoria. So she continued to invest in commercial real estate and her company operates those malls. I think I understand also she's a big golfer. She apparently loves to golf, although an important. employee who at one point approached me outside of court said she had put away her clubs to focus on the Bay Deal.

Interesting. And I mean, based on what you're telling me, it sounds like she was pretty successful with her businesses here in Canada. That's a matter of some dispute. During this legal battle, Ms. Liu filed, among other things, materials with the court, letters of support talking about how her company had turned around, particularly the Tuasun Mills Mall. But other court documents suggested that her malls actually operate at a loss and are heavily mortgaged. So it's a little bit difficult to get a picture of just how successful her businesses are here in Canada. But certainly she continues to own and operate those malls. We'll be right back. Okay, Susan, fast forward to the demise of the bay. Ruby wants to buy

28 of the base leases. When did this become contentious? Almost right away. So she did receive court approval very quickly to acquire three of those leases. So she has three of those former base stores now because they are located in malls that she owns. And so obviously there was landlord consent to the deal.

She's essentially the landlord. She got court approval. She spent $6 million on those three leases and owns them and will now redevelop them into stores. But for the rest of the leases, the other 25, it became clear almost immediately that there were going to be some issues. There were these meetings in early June that she held with some of Canada's largest mall owners, names that Canadians even might be familiar with. We're talking about companies like Cadillac Fairview, Ivanhoe, Cambridge, Oxford Properties, et cetera. And those meetings became very tense.

Even though we found out through court documents that the Bay's lawyers had told her team to be, prepared to answer a number of questions about the businesses she planned to launch in those spaces because it was going to be very important to receive consent from the landlords to basically smooth the way for this being approved in the court. Through our reporting and throughout court documents, what became clear was that at those meetings, Ms. Liu's team was not able to answer basic questions. Things like, who are your suppliers going to be? How are going to handle logistics of running 25 very large stores spread across three provinces, things about how she was going to bring on retail experience in her team? Because of course,

Ms. Liu, while extremely experienced as a real estate developer, does not have any experience running a retailer of this size and complexity. So questions like that came up at these meetings and the meetings grew quite tense when her team was not able to answer those questions. Very shortly after the landlords basically signaled, we are going to oppose this deal. And that was really the core of the legal fight that ended up consuming months of the court's time. And so there's a number of, I would say, interesting things that you did to try to convince the course that she was the right person to take over these leases. Let's start with how she tried to deal with her quote unquote lack of experience. How did she try to combat that? One of the things

she did to try to combat that. In fact, at those first meetings with the landlords, was to say, don't worry about it, I'm going to hire some very seasoned retail executives. And she put one particular name forward, Wayne Drummond, who was a former president of Hudson's Bay. She paid Mr. Drummond to attend the meetings with those landlords and had discussed her plans to have him as part of her team, helping to run the stores as sort of a steady hand and experienced hand. And so essentially her message was, it's okay that I don't have experience. I'm going to hire people with experience, which is totally legitimate. But in reality, according to court filings, Mr. Drummond had just been retained for a few hours that day just to meet with the

landlords and was hired for a couple of other things on sort of a contract to contract basis, if you will. But there was a disparity between what her team said publicly about Mr. Drummond's involvement in their project and the reality behind the scenes. Yeah, definitely sounds like the representation there is very different. Yes, in fact, the judge in the case in his eventual decision on this called that discrepancy startling. That was the word that he used. And it wasn't long before Mr. Drummond himself withdrew from involvement in the plan. It was by mid-June, so only a couple of weeks after those meetings, they were asking him to meet with the media to tell them, you know, how excited he was to work on the project.

and Mr. Drummond declined. This is some correspondence that came out in court documents. He cited a limited understanding of their business plan and of his proposed role in it. But Ms. Liu's team continued to tell reporters and landlords that he was part of the project, leading to media reports that Mr. Drummond called false and misleading in his correspondence with Central Walk. So that was just one example of a discrepancy between what was being said publicly about their plans and what was actually happening. Were there other discrepancies that you found? Yes, there were others. For one thing, Ms. Liu said quite consistently throughout the case that she planned to hire about 1,800 people to

help run these stores. And she had pledged to the court that she was going to prioritize hiring former Hudson's Bay employees. You know, more than 9,000 people lost their jobs as a result of the dissolution of the Bay. And so she said she was going to prioritize giving those people jobs. But, But her posts on Chinese language social media were somewhat different. In one post in early September on a platform called Red Note, Ms. Liu said, I really want to, after acquiring Hudson's Bay, make all 25 stores staffed entirely by Chinese people, Chinese managers, Chinese salespeople, trained by Chinese people, unquote. And of course, there's nothing wrong with running a business and wanting to hire people from your own community business.

people do it all the time. But it certainly was a contradiction between what Ms. Liu had said to the court. Because if she was going to prioritize for the most part former Hudson's Bay employees, it's quite likely that 100% of those people would not have been Chinese or Chinese Canadian. And so that was yet another discrepancy. Okay, yeah. There was also this information about her hiring a person named Craig Patterson. Tell me about why that's significant. Yes, Mr. Patterson is the publisher of an online publication. It's sort of an industry publication. writes about the retail industry in Canada called Retail Insider. And he'd been writing quite

extensively about Ms. Liu's plans for the stores. Many of his stories were quite positive in tone. He had written, for example, that she was preparing to reshape Canadian retail by rethinking what a store can be. That was his words. And at some point in the case, he began appearing at court. He was wearing a ruby ring and acknowledged that he was actually working for her following having written those stories, it's important to say he did step back from covering the case while working with the team and had another writer writing about it. But he did remain the publisher of the publication and in charge of its content during that time. And he told me at the time that he was temporarily providing some retail guidance to their team. He said he didn't think his

involvement was noteworthy or newsworthy, but it's certainly unusual. And Susan, another unusual element to this case was that she wrote letters to the judge. Tell me about that. Yes, as opposition to this deal mounted, Ms. Liu did decide to write directly to the judge who was overseeing this case. That's not common, right? It's not common. And in fact, it was against the advice of Hudson's Bayes lawyers who had urged her not to do so. She acknowledged that in the email that she sent to the judge. She sent this email through Linda Chin, the CEO of her company Central Walk, who frequently served as a translator for Ms. Liu during media interviews and appeared with her in court. But this email signed by Ms. Liu praised the judge. She wrote, on June 23rd in the courtroom, the very first

moment I saw you, I felt an unshakable belief that you were a person of justice and strength. She went on to write about marveling at how he remained, quote, so steadfast and confident and noble in the face of what she referred to as corruption by the other parties in the case. She She wrote of the judge's quiet but commanding presence, his dignity. She asked in the letter, is this what I have read of in books, true nobility? Or is it the lifelong defense of your own integrity and kindness? Or perhaps is there also a silent sorrow in your heart at the compromises this world demands? Certainly not the kind of letter that we usually see in creditor protection court proceedings.

So the judge disclosed the correspondence at a hearing the following week. So he was quite transparent about having received these letters. He reminded everyone present that no party should be communicating with him directly. And in fact, the same day, the Office of the Chief Justice of the Ontario Superior Court stepped in as well, sending a letter to Ms. Liu calling the emails inappropriate and warning her that if the correspondence continued that it would be considered harassing. So, Susan, you've been following this case for months, attending all of the hearings. was it as bumbastic as this sounds? The hearings were certainly eventful. They were delayed a couple of times.

At one point, they were adjourned because Ms. Liu appeared without legal representation. She had a couple of different lawyers over the course of these proceedings. She also took to appearing at the courthouse with a number of supporters, particularly at the most pivotal of the hearings, which happened in late August. She actually appeared with so many people in tow that there was jockeying for seats in the courtroom in a proceeding where there had always been, it had always been well attended, but there had always been plenty of seats for observers.

So she showed up with quite a few supporters. At one point, actually, while I was standing outside of the courthouse, one of those supporters, an employee named Mia Wu, actually approached me and another reporter. She first off said no one had arranged for her to speak to the media, but that she wanted to express her admiration of Ms. Liu. And, you know, she was praising Ms. Liu's work ethic. She was talking about being so appreciative of the opportunities she had given her

and asking us to scan a QR code to look at the change.org petition I mentioned before. As she departed, she, you know, she sort of cried out, support this lady, please. And, you know, so it was very passionate about advocating for her boss. And the hearings themselves were, they were quite long, they were very contentious. And they involved a lot of back and forth about this plan that Ms. Liu had put forward. whether it was going to succeed or not, whether the court should approve it or not, and clearly gave the judge a lot to think about. Okay, so the judge issued his ruling at the end of October. What did he make up all this? Yeah, it's very clear, as I mentioned before, that the judge

deliberated very carefully on this decision. It took quite a lot of time. I know from having spoken with sources in the case that some people were, you know, as the fall wore on, curious about when the decision would actually come. But the judge talked a lot about how this decision basically boiled down to balancing out interests in this case. So again, when we're talking about a creditor protection process, it's very important to prioritize recovering as much money as possible. Again, for people who are owed money, they may not get back otherwise. And that's why you hold these kinds of auctions in the first place. So the judge had to consider, you know, we have a deal on the table. And it was $70 million about that, right? That's right. And it

would have generated about $50 million for the lenders after fees and things like that. That was the estimate about how much it would have generated. So, you know, you balance that out, the needs of these lenders to be paid back the money they're owed with the rights of the landlords, essentially, who did not want to be forced into a landlord-tenant relationship with a tenant that they did not believe was going to be successful. And indeed, who would have taken over leases with rights to renew debt. decades into the future, some of them into the next century, long after the parties in this case

would even remain alive. And so when he took that balance into account, he ultimately decided to reject this deal. Could this case have wider implications? Certainly it could. Yeah, I mean, it sets a legal precedent. I think that future cases may look at when they're looking at these kinds of assignments. When we see a company fall apart like this in a court-supervised process of this nature, you do have an extraordinary power, is what the judge called it, under the law, to force lease assignments like this, even amid objections from landlords. But when judges are considering in the future whether or not to exercise that power, this is almost certainly going to be one of the cases that they will look back at for precedent.

So it certainly does establish something that will be considered in the future. Okay. So just to end here, Susan, what do we know about Ruby's plan? Like, is that the end of her bay pursuits, or is she still determined to make this, quote, unquote, new bay? So we know from other media reports that Ms. Liu has said she plans to appeal the decision. Her team did not respond to multiple requests that we made for comment on this story, including about her current plan, so we don't know whether the plan to appeal is ongoing. But we do know that she has these three former bay locations in the malls that she owns and plans to open a retail. operation there. And so, you know, we will see what that looks like in the coming months and years, whether she's able to make that successful. Over the course of this battle, you know,

Ms. Liu had said that she felt she was being unfairly discriminated against as an outsider to this industry and that she should be given a chance. The landlords had said we're talking about basically someone who's a dilettante in this industry who is going to open up operations that will quickly fail and will damage the image of our malls and further harm us after a long period of suffering for those malls as the bay declined and ultimately failed. And so which of them is right? Ms. Liu has the opportunity to demonstrate what she's capable of doing with those three locations and we'll see what they look like when they open. And it's possible that this fight is not over. If she does indeed decide to appeal, this could well be going back to court. Susan, this has been

Great. Thank you so much. Thanks for having me. That was Susan Krasinski-Robertson, the Globe's Retailing Reporter. That's it for today. I'm Cheryl Sutherland. Our producers are Madeline White, Michal Stein, and Allie Graham. David Crosby edits the show. Adrian Chung is our senior producer, and Angela Pichenza is our executive editor. Thanks so much for listening, and I'll talk to you soon. Thank you.