Peter Nygård

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Peter Nygård (born 1943 in Finland), is a Canadian fashion executive. Chairman of Nygård International of Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada, a company that makes women's wear. He has a park named after him in Deloraine, Canada. He lives in the Bahamas.

Nygård, owner of the Tan Jay line, has also captured international fashion headlines. Nygård is well known for his lavish Hollywood-style extravaganzas both in Canada, the United States and The Bahamas. He is also famous for placing whole page advertisements in Winnipeg newspapers to present his case against union organizing drives. The Manitoba labour board has ruled that Tan Jay had committed unfair labour practices, including the refusal to deduct union dues, to allow the union access to the plant and to pay into the union's retirement and health and welfare funds. The labour board ruling followed a history of intimidatory practices used by the company against its immigrant workforce, many of them from the Philippines. The company was ordered to pay the union and illegally laid off employees $150,000 in monies owed and fines. Also The Manitoba labour board ruled against Nygard International partnership on Managers overtime pay [1]

It’s worth noting that Peter Nygård is an important shareholder in Tarrant [2]. While Nygård’s employees in Canada have been able to make use of legal processes to gain recognition of their union, Tarrant workers in Mexico are denied that same right because of the lack of labor standards enforcement by our NAFTA partner [3].

Much of Nygård's success has been underwritten by his political acumen in lobbying for favourable terms from federal government assistance programmes to finance the restructuring of his four factories in Winnipeg. He has now moved his corporate headquarters to Toronto.

He is also known to sue magazines and newspapers who tell negative stories about him. He has also sued ex-Playboy model, Linda Lampenius, journalists and ex-girlfriends. He pays more child support than anybody else in Canada for one child [4]. He lost the case in Los Angeles Superior Court against A-Lehdet [5] and ex-employee on July 2006, which was about slander and breach of contract [6](In Finnish).

His villa in the Bahamas can be rented for $35,000 per day during 2007. [7]

In 2003, his estimated worth was nearly 500 million Canadian dollars, which is under dispute.^[1]