million. In 1987, Lee-Chin took the proceeds from his Mackenzie investment to buy a Kitchener-based company called the Advantage Investment Council (a division of AIC Limited) for $200,000. At the time, the company had holdings of around C$800,000. He renamed the company AIC, and developed it to a fund that controlled around C$6 billion, with hundreds of thousands of investors. Following the acquisition of AIC Limited, Lee-Chin set up the Berkshire group of companies, comprising an investment planning arm, a securities dealership and an insurance operation. By 2007, Berkshire had amassed more than C$12 billion of assets under administration. In 2007, Manulife acquired Berkshire from Portland Holdings in exchange for shares, making Portland one of the largest shareholders of Manulife. In 2009, Lee-Chin sold AIC Limited to Manulife for an undisclosed amount. The following year, Manulife rebranded the heritage AIC funds and eliminated the AIC name from the mutual fund line-up. In addition to being the founder and Chairman of Portland Holdings Inc., Mr. Lee-Chin is chairman and director of Mandeville Holdings Inc. and Executive Chairman, CEO, and Portfolio Manager of Portland Investment Counsel Inc. Investments 1990–2005 In the late 1980s, AIC suffered from a collapse in the real estate market, in which it had invested. It recovered throughout the early 1990s by maintaining investments in large groups, such as Merrill Lynch and TD bank (formerly Toronto Dominion). This caused investments to grow from US$8 million in 1990 to nearly US$8 billion by 1998. Lee-Chin was reluctant to invest in the dotcom boom, and saw AIC investments lose 8 per cent in value, even as the S&P gained 56 per cent. Investors moved US$224 million out of AIC's flagship "Advantage Mutual Fund". The Globe and Mail ran an article predicting that even more investors would leave the fund, meaning that it would run out of cash and be forced to sell its core holdings. Lee-Chin's response was to sell stock in Coca-Cola, and invest US$65 million into Mackenzie Holdings (the same firm in which he had invested US$400,000 16 years previously). Letters were sent to all 350,000 investors, explaining the strategy. The investors were calmed by the purchase, and the stock was later sold to Investor Group (the same company Lee-Chin had worked for in the 1980s) at more than twice the price AIC had paid for it. In 2000 and 2001, following the dotcom crash, AIC outperformed the market