The 2000 Dot-Com Crash turns Roger Bolduc’s apparent financial ruin into a story of both collapse and concealment. The market’s reversal destroyed the conspicuous fortune he had assembled through a rapid corporate maneuver, while later evidence suggested that he had quietly protected a substantial portion of his wealth before the downturn.

Building a Fortune in the Internet Boom

After inheriting one million dollars when his father died in 1987, Roger continued working as an accountant at Hydro-Québec for several years while considering how to start a business of his own. By the mid-1990s, he and another accountant at the Crown corporation had recognized the commercial potential of the Internet and multimedia and began investing in startups.

The partners used a staged approach to accumulate control: one played the hard negotiator and the other the accommodating one, enabling them to take stakes in companies and quickly become majority shareholders. They applied the tactic to a prominent Quebec Internet company, then attached further businesses acquired in similar fashion. Their enterprise grew alongside the market’s appetite for technology stocks.

The Reverse Takeover and the Reversal

In 1999, as the technology bubble continued to inflate, the partners acquired a small-cap mining company that was already listed on the stock exchange through a reverse takeover. They used the listed company as the vehicle for their emerging technology conglomerate. Within weeks, its share price climbed from ten cents to almost twenty dollars, making the partners multimillionaires almost overnight.

That paper fortune proved fragile. When the technology bubble burst in 2000, the value they had built collapsed like a house of cards. Roger later gave the impression that the crash had nearly ruined him, a claim that became difficult to reconcile with the money he had kept beyond the reach of ordinary scrutiny.

Hidden Money and the Crash’s Aftermath

In autumn 2001, amid his family’s uncertainty about his disappearance and the missing D’Anjou cameo, Isabelle D’Anjou examined the safe in Roger’s Québec City office. It held an old copy of his will and a power of attorney covering only known bank accounts. A concealed compartment at the back contained evidence of deposits in Switzerland and the Cayman Islands, amounting to roughly one million U.S. dollars.

The discovery revealed that Roger’s modest visible accounts had not represented the whole of his finances. He had left much of his money outside Canada, apparently to shelter it from the tax authorities and perhaps to keep it from Isabelle as well. The narrative suggests that he may have anticipated the market crash and put some funds away beforehand; it does not establish exactly when he made the deposits. The discrepancy between his story of near-ruin and the hidden accounts made his supposed losses—and the family’s suspicions about his disappearance—more difficult to take at face value.