It’s not every day of the week that one gets the chance to listen to Robert Lantos trying to dodge credit for something.

Yet when asked point-blank if he’s the real architect behind the E1 structure which highly resembles Alliance Communications’ original corporate landscape, Lantos – the E1 board member – freezes. You could almost hear the wheels turning over the phone line from California, as he hears a reporter draw yet another E1 comparison to his own former empire. But the parallels are impossible to ignore.

Lantos finally offers that in some ways, E1 ‘looks like Alliance, but … I’m not part of management; I’m not on payroll.’ However, he does concede that in terms of E1 senior management: ‘Everyone but Darren [Throop] and Peter [Emerson] are Alliance alumni.’

The mogul-turned-producer also observes that ‘Alliance has broadcasting; E1 doesn’t,’ which begs the question of whether or not E1 will acquire some broadcasting assets, or any other assets now that Wall St. took a big dive in October, and many media companies are re-assessing their value in its wake.

‘I think that there will be some huge changes in the Canadian media landscape in the next 18 months,’ says Lantos. ‘There will be companies sold, others broken up into pieces, and my personal forecast is that E1 will likely be a player on the buyer side.’

When asked why he chose to sell his distribution company (Maximum Films) as well as his major shareholder interests in other companies (see story, p. 13), he says it was a market decision.

‘There were two options,’ he explains. ‘Bundle all these companies together and do an IPO, or merge with a company that is already public. But as the economy began to look dicey – and it’s been over a year now – we made a collective decision to pay attention to suitors that were already public. Given what has happened on the financial markets, it was the right decision to make.’