Russell Kalmacoff - B.Comm., MBA

President and Chief Executive Officer

Mr. Kalmacoff’s experience includes origination, negotiation, advising with respect to investments; application of broad range of instruments and vehicles including syndications, limited partnerships, trusts, asset backed securities, private placements and public offering of debt and equity. Management of a public company engaged in financial intermediation and mortgage banking.

Mr. Kalmacoff is a director of Trafina Energy Corp., an exploration and production company with significant interests in natural gas and coal bed methane in Central Alberta and is listed on the TSX Venture exchange. He is also a director of Stoneset Equities, a property development company with major, mixed-use projects under development in British Columbia, Alberta and Saskatchewan.

Mr. Kalmacoff is President of the Berkeley Club of Canada in which capacity he has recently organized various events including: two alumni receptions for Chancellor Birgeneau in Toronto; an alumni breakfast for Professor Robert Scharf, head of the Buddhist Department of Berkeley, in Vancouver; and the Alberta-California Energy Conference in Berkeley. He co-chaired the campaign which established a Professorship of Canadian Studies at Berkeley, and is a member of the Advisory Board of the Canadian Studies Program.

In his early career, Mr. Kalmacoff’s employment included: Salomon Brothers, New York; A.E. LePage Ltd., Toronto; Nu West Development, Calgary; and Nesbitt Thomson Securities, Toronto, in corporate finance where he was responsible for the formation of a public real estate investment trust and a public mortgage investment corporation. He co-authored Introduction to the Canadian Mortgage Market, a text used by the Investment Dealers Association for twenty years.

Mr. Kalmacoff’s formal education includes: two years of engineering at the University of Calgary; Bachelor of Commerce, University of Manitoba, accounting major; Master of Business Administration, University of California, Berkeley, finance major; and doctoral studies at Berkeley and New York University. At Manitoba and Berkeley he wrote major papers on gasoline marketing and competition law in Canada. At Berkeley and NYU he was a Senior Fellow of Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation, studying the secondary mortgage market.

Industry associations of which Mr. Kalmacoff is a member include: Urban Development Institute; Mortgage Bankers Association; San Francisco Planning and Urban Research Associates; National Business Incubation Association; Venture Capital Association of Alberta; Calgary Chamber of Commerce; and the Independent Lubricant Manufacturers Association.