Trials, triumphs and tribulations of auto parts billionaire Frank Stronach (2024)

At 91 years of age, auto parts billionaire Frank Stronach should be kicking back and reflecting on a life well-lived.

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That coda may not be in the cards.

Instead, the Austrian immigrant who built Aurora-based Magna Auto Parts into a worldwide industrial colossus is now facing his #MeToo moment.

Details are sparse, but the bombshell press release unveiled late on June 7, sent tremors reverberating from Bay St. to Rosedale and points beyond.

Peel Regional Police blandly announced that detectives from its Special Victims Unit had arrested “a 91-year-old male from Aurora in connection with a sexual assault investigation.”

Cops say the alleged sexual assaults ran from the 1980s to just last year. Stronach was arrested and charged with five criminal offences: Rape (that charge was stricken from the Criminal Code in 1983), indecent assault on a female, two counts of sexual assault, and forcible confinement.

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On Friday, CTV News — citing court documents — reported that the alleged incidents occurred in 1980, 1986 and 2023 and involve three separate complainants.

Famed criminal lawyer Brian Greenspan, who is repping Stronach, has said his client “categorically denies the allegations of impropriety which have been brought against him and looks forward to responding to the charges.”

Now, the auto parts czar’s golden years are beginning to lose their lustre.

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Stronach grew up under the Nazis in his native Austria, where as a young man he became a machinist. Like many people in war-torn Europe, he yearned for greener pastures and immigrated to Canada in the 1950s with a few hundred bucks in his pocket.

The determined immigrant would turn Magna Auto Parts into an industrial monster with plants spanning the globe and untold billions in revenues. He married Elfriede Sallmutter in 1964 (she died in March) and the pair had two children, Belinda and Andrew.

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Stronach has always boasted about Magna’s “unique entrepreneurial culture.” According to Stronach’s unauthorized biographer, Wayne Lilley (no relation to The Toronto Sun’s Brian Lilley), that was the reason the mogul charged the company such high consulting fees for his wisdom.

Lilley writes in Magna Cum Laude: How Frank Stronach Became Canada’s Best Paid Man, that like a lot of companies in the auto industry, these industrial behemoths were fuelled by testosterone and as a result lagged in promoting women.

The author suggests that Stronach’s predilection for pretty women played a role.

“Stronach’s own wandering eye and his admiration for beautiful women may have been why little had been done to modify the macho corporate culture,” Lilley wrote.

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Former Magna Entertainment employee Tom Dillon said he first met Stronach in the early 1970s when he was managing the famed Siro’s in the horse racing hotbed of Saratoga Springs, N.Y. He called his friend’s reputation “as a bit of a rake” well deserved.

Once, Dillon claims, Stronach ran off with one of his employees.

Stronach has never commented publicly on the book or those particular incidents.

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It was not the kind of publicity Frank Stronach was looking for. It was an Auto Guys Gone Wild story that landed on Page 1 of the Detroit News in September 1997. The Wall Street Journal, the New York Times and others picked up the tale.

Magna International Inc. was facing a bombshell sexual harassment suit from a former saleswoman in the Detroit office. And it was quite a yarn.

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Lorrie Beno told the News her male co-workers often entertained auto industry customers at one of the plethora of Motown strip clubs. When the businessmen’s lunch with a side of boob was done, drunken salesmen would sexually harass female workers.

”We don’t believe there’s any merit in the litigation,” then executive vice-president Graham Orr said.

But the spotlight was not only shining on Magna and Stronach (who was not accused of any wrongdoing) but on the Big Three automakers.

”I used to work at suppliers where this sort of conduct was commonplace,” one industry source told the Financial Post in 1997. “There are certain customers who want to be entertained that way, just like some like to go to the ball game.”

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It emerged at the time that one Magna salesman spent an eye-popping $17,000 at strip joints in 1996. But the salt on the wound, Beno said, was that after the lunchtime booze-a-rammas, male Magna staff would return to the office and grope the women and verbally harass them.

Magna proclaimed that it ‘”does not tolerate any form of sexual discrimination or harassment.” Eventually, the company settled out of court with Beno and another woman.

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While Frank Stronach was married to Elfriede, his mistresses were Magna and thoroughbred horse racing. It was a passion he shared with his daughter, Belinda, the apple of his eye.

The 58-year-old stunning blond had been by Frank’s side since she was a kid and dropped out of York University to work at Magna. Along the way, she too was touched by scandal when former Maple Leaf Tie Domi’s ex-wife accused the businesswoman of being the “other woman” in their divorce proceedings.

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At the time of the Domi Brouhaha, she told CityNews: “I do not want to speculate on the motivation behind making inaccurate and irresponsible public statements about me, but it is unacceptable to make them. Any problems between Tie and Leanne Domi are not related to me.”

Later, when she crossed the floor to join the Liberals, effectively dumping her boyfriend, then-deputy Conservative leader Peter MacKay, in Parliament in front of the whole country on May 17, 2005. Stronach had run for the new Conservative Party leadership but later butted heads with future prime minister Stephen Harper.

The affair left MacKay with a broken heart and newly-minted Liberal Belinda with a plum cabinet position.

Belinda and her dad’s shared passions and piques eventually triggered a family split. In a brutal public hoedown, Frank, his wife and son Andrew sued Belinda and others for $520 million and control of their pony enterprise, The Stronach Group.

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The company controlled racetracks stables and gambling businesses, including the famed Gulfstream Park in Florida and Santa Anita Park in California.

Frank claimed his daughter and her kids were spendthrifts running the company into the ground. She blasted her dad’s “idiosyncratic and often unprofitable projects” costing the family (US)$580 million.

The suit was settled in 2020 with Belinda getting the tracks and her father getting the stables and breeding businesses. Eventually, there was a rapprochement.

“We’re father and daughter again,” Frank Stronach told the Financial Post in 2022.

The question is: Will Belinda stand by Frank Stronach in the dark hours ahead?

Police are asking members of the public who may have relevant information to contact them.

bhunter@postmedia.com

@HunterTOSun

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