Fraudster pleads guilty to kidnapping U.S. citizen in Vancouver
Credit to Author: Keith Fraser| Date: Sat, 21 Dec 2019 00:06:50 +0000
A man convicted of fraud appeared in B.C. Supreme Court on Friday and pleaded guilty to one count of kidnapping.
Ayaz Dhanani, who received a lifetime securities trading ban in 2016 and was later sentenced to three years in prison for fraud, entered his plea during a brief court appearance in Vancouver.
The offence involved the victim, a U.S. citizen, being restrained in Zap Straps and with a hood placed over his head in a van, with Dhanani also being in the van and having staged the abduction.
The victim, who wanted to rent something from Dhanani, was later rescued by police from an apartment in the Shangri-La Hotel on West Georgia Street in Vancouver. The offence occurred on April 17, 2016.
Before accepting the guilty plea, Justice Kenneth Ball confirmed with the accused that he was making his plea voluntarily and that he was admitting the elements of the offence as laid out in the charge.
Dhanani also agreed that if an agreement had been reached by the Crown and defence for a sentence, that any such agreement would not be binding on the court and the judge would have the discretion to impose whatever sentence was deemed fit.
Crown counsel Dasein Nearing told the judge she and the accused’s lawyer had agreed there would be no need for a pre-sentence report. The plea came as a three-week trial was about to open in January.
A one-day sentencing hearing on the kidnapping count has been set for March 9. Dhanani will remain in custody until then.
In 2014, Dhanani was brought before a panel of the B.C. Securities Exchange Commission for defrauding a stranger of $55,000 in circumstances where he’d approached the stranger in a bank and managed to persuade him to give him the money to invest in a mining company. It was just one of a number of frauds he was eventually convicted of committing.
In April 2014, the registrar of mortgage brokers of B.C. issued a cease-and-desist order to Dhanani because he was holding himself out as a mortgage broker without being registered.
In 2018 he pleaded guilty to four counts of fraud over $5,000 and of breaking a securities trading ban. He later pleaded guilty to defrauding three victims of $153,000.
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