Missing businessman left Griffith Energy poised for breakthrough, friend says

TORONTO – Before businessman Bradley Griffiths disappeared this week in a deep lake in Ontario’s cottage country, he was working to put Griffiths Energy International at the forefront of Chad’s emerging oil and gas industry, his lawyer said Friday.

Jay Park, the lawyer for Calgary-based Griffiths Energy, said he was shocked to learn the 55-year-old businessman went missing when his preparations “were just now about to come to fruition.”

He said the two men had become friends while working on the Chad project.

“Brad’s the kind of guy who makes friends very easily,” Park said in a telephone interview.

Ontario Police Police from Parry Sound, Ont., and private divers have searched the waters and shoreline of Lake Joseph since Monday when Griffiths was last seen in the water, apparently without a life jacket. He had gone out boating.

As of Friday, searchers had been were unable to locate him and Griffiths is officially missing.

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Park – who was out of the country when he heard the news – said Friday from Oslo that Griffiths Energy was left to announce that its chairman and driving force was gone just as the company was about to reveal a new management team.

The new executives, led by oil and gas veteran Gary Guidry, were announced Thursday but Park said all of the groundwork had been laid by Griffiths.

“If this had happened a few months ago, it would have been more of a problem for the business,” Park said in a telephone interview Friday.

As things have turned out, Griffiths Energy is poised to take advantage of Chad’s new approach for dealing with oil and gas companies, he said.

“The arrangement we have is more desirable than what’s existed in the past,” Park said.

The company has been granted two land concessions in an oil-rich country that has been relatively undeveloped compared with some of its neighbours – Libya to the northeast, Sudan to the east and Nigeria to the southwest.

Park said major oil companies had discovered oil in Chad long ago but, until recent reforms, they considered the country “a bridge too far.”

“The opportunity to Griffiths is quite considerable,” Park said.

Griffiths Energy’s new president and CEO, Gary Guidry, will be joined by Dean Tucker as chief operating officer, as well several other former executives of Orion Oil and Gas.

Guidry also becomes a director, with Griffiths still officially chairman of the board.

“Our management team is excited to be given the opportunity to execute the strategic vision that Brad Griffiths laid out when he acquired the company’s world class asset base. Our management team believes that the company’s assets have the most potential ‘upside’ of any project the team has worked on in their respective careers,” Guidry said in a statement.

A request for comment to Guidry was referred to Park.

Ontario Provincial Police said Friday that the private company hired to search for Griffiths had experienced technical difficulties. The OPP’s marine unit has broken off its search temporarily, a police statement said.