In Esfahani v. Samimi, 2018 ONCA 516  the Ontario Court of Appeal confirmed that a plaintiff pursuing a fraudulent conveyance or preference must recognize that the legal landscapes changes with a bankruptcy and that the effects of a bankruptcy filing cannot be ignored. The unfortunate outcome for the plaintiff, Djalaleddin Esfahani (“Esfahani“), was that an otherwise valid claim to set aside a fraudulent conveyance was dismissed because it was brought outside of the bankruptcy process.…

The general prohibition on false or misleading advertising under the Competition Act is somewhat unusual in that it contains two adjudicative regimes, criminal and civil, that can be used to address the same conduct – the making of a materially false or misleading representation to the public for the purpose of promoting one’s product or business interest[1]. The elements of the conduct that must be proven under both the criminal and civil provisions…

Join Baker Mckenzie’s global practitioners on Thursday, June 14 for a Deferred Prosecution Agreement Roundtable to gain important insights on: The impact that Bill C-74 will have on corporate criminal law in Canada; How the Canadian DPA system (which will be known as the Remediation Agreement Regime) will work in practice and how it will impact the Integrity Regime; The critical lessons learned from negotiating DPAs in other jurisdictions; Strategies for self-disclosure and dealing with parallel multinational investigations, multiple enforcement agencies, and global…

This is our third and final post on the complex fraud carried out by Norma and Ronald Walton, and the Ontario Court of Appeal decisions arising from their scheme. In our earlier posts, we focused on the use of a constructive trust as a remedy for breach of fiduciary duty and third party fraud liability. In this post, we discuss the risk that comes with bringing a summary judgment motion in the context of…

A recent decision from the Ontario Superior Court demonstrates the overlap between civil and criminal findings, and how an employer can use a criminal verdict to recover additional damages in a civil claim. In Atlas Copco Canada Inc. v. David Hillier 2018 ONSC 1558, rendered March 7, 2018, an employer “piggybacked” off of a criminal court decision to recover an additional $20 million from an ex-senior employee who accepted payments and benefits in return…

We previously reported in an article last August that Ontario Courts are increasingly finding civil fraud on the basis of material omissions, as in the United Kingdom. This trend has continued in a recent decision by the Supreme Court of British Columbia in Wang v Shao, 2018 BCSC 377. The case involved the aborted sale of a home in Vancouver’s upscale Shaughnessy neighbourhood for a purchase price of $6.138 million. After viewing the home,…

This is our second of three posts on the Ontario Court of Appeal’s recent decision in DBDC Spadina Ltd. v. Walton 2018 ONCA 60 arising out of a complex fraud scheme perpetrated by Norma and Ronauld Walton. This post discusses the finding by the Court of Appeal that it was inappropriate for the application judge to have granted a constructive trust as a remedy for breach of fiduciary duty. The Court of Appeal set aside the…