Fraud & Financial Crime

A multi-million dollar allegation, and what it rested on.

Our client was an employee of a well-known Canadian firm, alleged to have defrauded millions of dollars and wired the proceeds to Europe. A private investigative company imaged and analysed employee hard drives, and reported that our client’s work computer held remnants of documents said to have facilitated the fraud.

The forensic finding sounded conclusive. It was not. Going through what the investigators had established, as against what they had merely concluded, and reading the underlying records in full, produced a win at trial and congratulations from the officer in charge of the investigation.

Intent is the element that fails.

Fraud requires dishonesty and deprivation, and it requires that the accused intended both. Financial matters are very often ambiguous on exactly that point: authority that really was given, accounting that was poor without being dishonest, a practice the whole office followed, an arrangement that soured commercially and got recharacterised afterwards.

The Crown has to exclude every one of those explanations beyond a reasonable doubt, and frequently it can’t.

Get in before the interview.

Fraud investigations are slow, which means people are usually approached long before any charge is laid: by an employer, by an internal investigator, by a regulator, or by police.

That’s the moment a lawyer is most useful and most often absent. An employment interview can be handed to police wholesale. Get advice before you attend anything, and remember that being obliged to explain yourself at work is not the same as being obliged to speak to an investigator.

Asset recovery and restraint.

Where police have seized funds, vehicles or property, or where a restraint order has been obtained, there’s separate work to be done alongside the prosecution, and it runs to its own timelines. Leaving it until the criminal matter concludes is a mistake.