Frank Stronach, the 91-year-old billionaire founding father of one of many world’s largest auto components firms, was arrested and charged on Friday in reference to a sexual assault investigation.
In a short information launch, the police drive for Peel Area, outdoors Toronto, mentioned that the time-frame of crimes Mr. Stronach was alleged to have dedicated spanned from the Nineteen Eighties till final yr.
Mr. Stronach, the Austrian-born founding father of Magna Worldwide, was charged with offenses that included indecent assault, sexual assault and forcible confinement. He was launched after being charged and can seem later at a court docket in Brampton, Ontario.
Brian Greenspan, Mr. Stronach’s lawyer, mentioned that his consumer “categorically denies the allegations of impropriety which have been introduced in opposition to him.”
He added: “He seems to be ahead to the chance to completely reply to the costs and to take care of his legacy, each as a philanthropist and as an icon of the Canadian enterprise neighborhood.”
Mr. Stronach turned a one-man machine store he based in 1957 into a worldwide enterprise. Underneath his administration, Magna, which additionally assembles automobiles for a number of automakers together with Mercedes-Benz, tried to take over each Chrysler and Opel, the European arm of Common Motors.
Buyers in Magna usually chafed at how Mr. Stronach used his management over the corporate via a particular class of share to contain it in numerous, generally unprofitable, ventures unrelated to creating automobile components, together with a failed restaurant chain, a shiny enterprise journal, golf programs and horse racing. In 2010, Magna gave Mr. Stronach about $1 billion to cede management.
The Stronach Group, which he based and which is now run by his daughter, Belinda Stronach, owns or manages horse racing tracks all through the US.
In 2013, Group Stronach, a pro-business protest get together based by Mr. Stronach, received two seats in Austrian state parliaments.
In an announcement, Tracy Fuerst, a Magna spokeswoman, mentioned that it “has no information of the investigation or the allegations which were raised past what has been reported within the media.”
The Stronach Group didn’t reply to a request for remark.
It’s unclear why the costs had been filed in Peel, which is a part of the higher Toronto metropolitan space. Mr. Stronach lives in York, which can be within the Toronto space and the place Magna has its headquarters. Constable Tyler Bell, a spokesman for the police, declined to touch upon the investigation.
Whereas he led Magna, which made him at one level Canada’s highest-paid government, Mr. Stronach usually provided iconoclastic financial and political theories or feedback that some discovered inappropriate. He started the corporate’s 2007 annual assembly not by discussing his bid for Chrysler, however by asking shareholders who was extra enticing to ladies, himself or his longtime aide, Manfred Gingl.
Mr. Stronach is the second Canadian billionaire to be charged with intercourse offenses in simply over every week. The police in Montreal introduced 21 sex-related expenses in opposition to Robert G. Miller, the founding father of Future Electronics, together with a number of counts of sexual exploitation of minors. The police drive mentioned that he had paid a number of younger women to carry out sexual acts.
