FROM THE - JOURNALS of Monte Friesner – Criminal & Intelligence Analyst and Consulaire for WANTED SA ~ Written & Contributed by CBC News (Canada)
Canada Has Its Own Tax Fraudsters Which Include the Elite & Wealthy
The president of the West
Edmonton Mall. A prominent Ottawa philanthropist. A notorious fraudster.
A pioneer of internet webcasting.
They are just a handful of the hundreds of Canadians named in the recent massive leak of records from offshore tax havens.
The 2.5 million files include financial and personal details on more than 550 Canadian taxpayers linked to companies and trusts based in the Caribbean and South Pacific.
Some of these individuals come from a few of the country's wealthiest families. Others fleeced their way to fortune.
Not all of them even knew they were
involved in offshore dealings. A few people were invited to participate
in business ventures that happened to be incorporated in tax-friendly
locales; one man's name was added as a supervisor on a family trust, by
friends, in case something happened to them.
Among the notorious names is Peter
Sabourin, a Toronto-area investment scammer who owes more than $32
million to victims. His name comes up 1,449 times in the leaked
documents.
Sabourin was found liable for fraud in
two Ontario Superior Court trials in 2007 and ordered to pay $3 million
in damages and interest.
Three years later, the Ontario
Securities Commission dinged him and his companies, two of which were
incorporated in the British Virgin Islands, $29.1 million for pushing
"sham investment schemes" and lying to investors.
Sabourin hasn't been seen since 2007, or
heard from in two years. Ontario Provincial Police said they are still
investigating him.
10 Canadians from the tax-haven data leak
How the rich hide their money offshore
5 big leaks of offshore financial data
Some others found in the tax-haven leak have colorful pasts that aren't even necessarily tied to their offshore presence.
Montreal-born Eric Levine made headlines
last week. The founder of health clubs in California, Hong Kong and
Southeast Asia, he drove a Ferrari, dated models and built a $24-million
beachfront villa in Thailand.
The leaked files disclose evidence of
more than $10 million in distributions to him between 2002 and 2006 from
a Cook Islands entity called the Brave heart Trust.
Meanwhile, on Friday, reports said
Thailand's Anti-Money Laundering Office was investigating California WOW
Xperience, the chain of gyms Levine opened in the early 2000s and took
public in 2005. (He resigned as CEO in 2011 but still owns 11 per cent
of the stock, according to the most recent securities filing.)
According to the reports, officials
allege the company funneled $57 million out of Thailand over the last
decade while falsely declaring losses on its balance sheet.
Other Canadians with troubled pasts who appear in the leaked data include:
Adrian Leemhuis, a former bond trader
who was fined $50,000 by the Mutual Fund Dealers Association of Canada
in 2011 for "extensive and diverse" misconduct as head of the mutual
fund brokerage ASL Direct.
Gerry Hargitai, a vitamin and
health-products tycoon who, in 1992, received a 25-year stock-trading
ban in B.C. after the province's securities commission found he
"fraudulently misappropriated" $221,000.
Mario Aiello, a Vancouver stock promoter linked to companies that have come under scrutiny.
In one case, RCMP alleged in 2004 that
Aiello was involved in a pump-and-dump scheme, though no charges were
ever laid. In another instance, the Vancouver Sun reported he had a role
in a company called Supatcha Resources, on which the U.S. Securities
and Exchange Commission issued a temporary trading halt after its stock
price shot up precipitously over two months in 2010.
Read more: Winnipeg financial guru in leaked database
Not everyone who incorporates a Caribbean company has a questionable past, and certainly there are real business reasons for it.
At first, David Ghermezian, president of
the West Edmonton Mall and scion of one of Canada's richest families,
couldn't recall his offshore involvement in a British Virgin Islands
company called Regal Mega Malls Development Corp. "I'm a director of
probably 250 companies," he said.
He checked into it and called back to
say that Regal Mega Malls was a joint venture with Chinese entrepreneurs
to develop a mega-shopping Centre in China. However, the project
fizzled, and records show the company became dormant in 2007.
William Mutual, one of the early
developers of webcasting and the CEO of Vancouver-based LiveCast, said
the company he's linked to in the leaked files was set up in the
Malaysian offshore haven of Labuan as a joint venture with the Malaysian
government to develop language software.
It petered out after the country's
former prime minister Mahathir Mohamad left office in 2003, Mutual said.
"It was about as legit as you can possibly imagine," he said.
Arthur Ross Gorrell, a B.C.-based
dentist and president of publicly traded oil-and-gas company Petromin
Resources, said the BVI corporation with his name on its books was
formed to develop a natural gas project in China with others, but it
never took off.
Asked why he used a Caribbean
corporation, Gorrell said "that was what was recommended by the group at
the time. And I guess the business advantage was that it would be
easier to get the permits."
Shirley Greenberg of Ottawa, a lawyer
and heiress to the Minto Developments fortune who was appointed to the
Order of Canada for her philanthropy and achievements advancing women's
rights, is tied to four BVI companies in the leaked records.
Her partner, Harry Stemp, and daughter, Martha Bergeron, also appear.
Bergeron said her mother was advised to
set up the offshore companies to purchase her home and several rental
properties in Barbados, where she used to live for part of the year.
There are also Canadians whose names appear in the offshore data apparently unwittingly.
"I have no familiarity with that term at
all," said Bruce Atkey, a Vancouver Island builder and surfer, when CBC
News first told him his name was in the leaked documents associated
with a now-defunct entity in the Cook Islands called the Neptune
Development Trust.
After making inquiries, Atkey discovered
he was listed because a couple of his American friends had, in case
tragedy befell them, given him an oversight role in the offshore trust
they set up.
"My friend… put my name on the trust. If
anything happened to him and his wife then I would make sure that that
trust went to his kids."
CBC News initially reported there were
at least 450 Canadians found in the huge trove of leaked data. But
subsequent inspection of thousands of the more than 2.5 million files
unearthed at least 100 more names, and it is thought there may be
hundreds more.
The colossal document leak came to light April 3 when a global group of media outlets, including the CBC, began reporting it.
The files were obtained by the
Washington-based International Consortium of Investigative Journalists
and shared with news organizations.
READ MORE ON : www.wantedsa.com
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