Dan Fumano: 12 years after developer charged with fraud, a closed-door court hearing
Credit to Author: Dan Fumano| Date: Mon, 17 Feb 2020 22:26:34 +0000
Twelve years after Tarsem Gill was accused of orchestrating a massive fraud, the Vancouver property developer still has no trial date and his next court appearance, later this month, will take place in private.
The saga of Tarsem Gill has been long and tangled. And now, after wrangling over evidence and disclosure delayed the setting of a trial date, one Vancouver lawyer who has followed Gill’s case for years describes it as a “poster child” for the difficulties of prosecuting fraud and financial crime in B.C.’s courts.
Gill was charged in 2008 with fraud, six years after the case, widely described as the largest legal fraud in Canadian history, came to light.
Gill’s co-accused, his former lawyer Martin Wirick, pleaded guilty in 2009 for his part in more than 100 fraudulent real estate transactions between 1999 and 2002. Gill followed suit four years later, pleading guilty in May 2013 to defrauding 77 homebuyers and 30 lenders of more than $31 million. But the year after, he applied to withdraw that guilty plea.
A judge permitted Gill in 2014 to reverse his guilty plea. Since then, the matter has been moving along quietly in B.C. Supreme Court. Today, Gill’s court record shows more than 110 court appearances on this file, but still no date has yet been set for a trial.
Now, Gill’s next court appearance is set for Feb. 19. But although Canadian courts are typically open to the public, this particular hearing will be shielded from public view.
Initially, when asked why the hearing will be held in a closed courtroom, B.C. Prosecution Service spokesman Daniel McLaughlin said: “The reasons why the court will be closed will not be publicized.”
Asked for more information, McLaughlin said: “There have been a number of pretrial applications involving evidence and disclosure that have delayed the fixing of a trial date. One of these applications will be spoken to at the upcoming in camera hearing.”
Many of the recent court appearances on Gill’s case have been pretrial conferences that were open to the public. But the court has ordered some hearings to be held in private “from time to time” during the proceedings, McLaughlin said, because of concerns around the disclosure of materials and related claims of privilege.”
Gill declined to answer questions about the upcoming hearing when reached by phone, telling The Vancouver Sun: “You need to talk to my lawyer.”
Asked if there will ever be a trial, Gill replied: “I don’t know. Everything is in the lawyers’ hands.”
Gill’s defence lawyer, Kevin McCullough, did not return calls.
Vancouver lawyer Ron Usher, who is not involved in Gill’s case but has observed it over the years, said the file is something of a “poster child” for the challenges of dealing with complex financial crimes in B.C. courts.
Despite the hard work of police investigators, Crown counsel and others in the system, Usher said, “Everybody is just hanging. It’s been 18 years since the crime was exposed. … Is there something that’s gone off the rails here?”
Usher pointed out that the case is proceeding at a time of significant public concern over financial crime in B.C., with the first phase of the public commission of inquiry into money laundering to begin later this month under B.C. Supreme Court Justice Austin Cullen.
“We have these incredible concerns about complex commercial crime and things like money laundering, and people like the idea that we should be doing more. But there’s some kind of problem here. Is it resources? Court time?” said Usher, the general counsel for the Society of Notaries Public of B.C., one of the organizations granted participant status in the Cullen Commission. “The public is clamouring for more action on complex commercial crime and money laundering. Well, good luck.
“Justice delayed is justice denied to the many victims.”
Almost $40 million was eventually paid out to victims through the Law Society of B.C.’s special compensation fund. But, as a B.C. Supreme Court judge said when sentencing Gill’s former lawyer, Martin Wirick, to seven years in jail in 2009, the scam brought the victims a “devastating emotional impact brought about by ongoing uncertainty regarding the status of their homes.”
“The words ‘panic,’ ‘despair,’ ‘stress,’ and ‘depression’ appear frequently,” in the submitted victim impact statements, the judge said, along with descriptions of “sleepless nights arising from the constant threat of foreclosure and legal action; the adverse impact of this stress on their relationships and families and on their physical health.”
In 2002, when the alleged scam was first revealed and Wirick resigned from the Law Society, a senior Vancouver police officer told Vancouver Sun reporter David Baines that it was “by far the largest investigation that the financial crime unit has ever undertaken, not only in terms of the amount of money involved, but also its complexity and scope.”
Now, nearly two decades later, as Gill’s hearing proceeds in private. with no trial date in sight, one wonders that police officers who worked so hard on that massive investigation years ago might be thinking about the delays.