Court paperwork present the corporate that runs the Just for Laughs comedy pageant owes practically $22.5 million to collectors.
Groupe Juste pour rire Inc. introduced Tuesday that it was searching for creditor safety and cancelling this 12 months’s pageant in Montreal, and mentioned Wednesday that the Toronto occasion could be getting the axe too — not less than quickly.
The papers filed in Quebec’s Superior Court present Juste pour rire owes $16.6 million to the National Bank of Canada.
It additionally owes practically $2 million to the Business Development Bank of Canada and greater than $2.5 million to the Societe de developpement des entreprises culturelles, a Quebec authorities company.
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A spokesman for the corporate declined to touch upon the monetary state of affairs.
Juste pour rire introduced Tuesday that it had laid off 75 workers — roughly 70 per cent of its workforce — because it appears to restructure.
The firm says it hopes the festivals will resume in 2025 as soon as it has completed restructuring the enterprise.
The occasion in Montreal usually occurs in July, and the Toronto pageant had been scheduled for September.
Juste pour rire blamed its monetary woes on numerous components, together with the COVID-19 pandemic, inflation and the altering leisure business, although court docket information present a bailiff seized greater than $800,000 in belongings from the corporate final week after it didn’t make a court-ordered cost to a former worker.
That worker just isn’t on the record of debtors filed in court docket.
That record does embrace Equipe Spectra, a Montreal pageant producer that’s owed greater than $611,000; and Bell Canada, which is owed greater than $237,000. Bell Canada owns a 51 per cent stake in Juste pour rire with occasion promoter Evenko.
Evenko and Equipe Spektra are each a part of Groupe CH — an organization headed by Geoff Molson, who sits on the board of Juste pour rire.
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