Value Village is registered in Saskatchewan as a retail store, with its head office in St. John’s New Brunswick. But the directors listed are all based in Bellevue, Washington.

On further research, we learned that Value Villages Inc. is the Canadian division of the second hand U.S.-based retail chain Savers. The President and CEO of Savers is Ken Alterman, a former PepsiCo executive. The chairman is Thomas Ellison, son of the company’s founder, who helped create the Salvation Army stores, then broke away to form a private for-profit version in 1954. Today Savers operates 208 second-hand stores in the United States, Canada and Australia.

The company is owned by the private equity investment firm Freeman Spogli and Co, which purchased Savers in mid-2006 from Berkshire Partners LLC for $US 550 million. Freeman Spogli owns a number of mid-level retail outlets, such as Mattress Giant and PETCO.

Here's what the blog site manimalia.org says about Freeman and Spogli:

Although Ronald P. Spogli, President Bush's newly nominated ambassador to Italy, studied in the country during college and later led a research project there on labor migration, it seems unlikely that those experiences served as the main reason for his June 2005 appointment. Spogli, a Los Angeles-based investment banker, also happens to be one of the president's most prolific donors. A classmate of the president at Harvard Business School, Spogli made his fortune in investment banking, founding the firm Freeman Spogli & Co. with fellow Bush fundraiser Brad Freeman. President Bush had previously appointed Spogli to the board of the U.S. State Department's Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board. Spogli and his wife, Georgia, made a whopping $802,807 in contributions to Republican candidates and party committees during the 2000, 2002 and 2004 election cycles.

With a basic Internet search combining the Freeman Spogli and WalMart names, I was unable to find a connection, other than representatives of both companies were on the guest list for a 2005 dinner with Prince Charles, hosted by George Bush, and both were on the donor list of the last Republican party convention. A small connection: Freeman Spogli also owns N.E.W., which supplies warranties and other related services to WalMart. They also own Ashbury Auto, which at one time had some business partnerships with Walmart, but they parted ways some years ago.

It's always possible that Freeman Spogli sold Value Village to Walmart very recently, and the official registration information hasn't been changed yet. But that is what we found for now.

How you can research a company in Saskatchewan:

Go to the Sask Justice Corporations Branch Online Registry. Click to enter the 'gated' area of the website, and set up a log-in account. Once you have an account, you will be able to search the registration records of both non-profit and profit corporations. The records don't have a whole lot of information, but they offer a starting point for the rest of your research, by providing names and addresses of company directors, changes of ownership, and other basics. You will also be able to find the people behind numbered companies. It costs $2 to search a company name or number, and $3 to look at a record. Or you can go to the Branch office and ask to see the record for free.