Murray Wood: Of Easter bunny bells and Juicy Fruit gum
For Murray Wood, Easter brings to mind grandma's practical advice about repurposing, and some of life's little lessons.
Details on what happened to a portion of the $1.04 million defrauded from the City of Saskatoon in the summer are emerging from a judge’s decision in Ontario Superior Court.
The seven-page decision, rendered by Justice Michael A. Penny on Nov. 22, outlines how the city’s money ended up in the account of a numbered corporation owned by a man who worked at Tim Hortons, then was distributed to several people who claimed they were using a service to exchange Iranian rials for Canadian dollars.
The money was originally taken from the city by an email fraudster who impersonated the chief financial officer of Allan Construction, asking city staff to change the banking information for the company. City staff obliged.
All of the funds have been recovered, partly due to the Ontario court decision, and new controls have been put in place to prevent a future fraud.
According to the decision, a man named Ali Ziloubaf was running a money services business through a TD bank account owned by a friend — because his own account had been shut down for using it for that business.
The friend, who worked at a Tim Hortons, established a numbered corporation which then opened the account. The agreement was the friend would receive between $500 and $1,500 for each financial transaction using the account.
Ziloubaf said under cross-examination that most of his deposits came from Dubai, with his services offered as a workaround to embargoes on financial dealings with Iran and restrictions on taking money out of the country.
Justice Penny writes that Ziloubaf said a person from Dubai whom he’d never met called him in August to tell him a man named Gavin Kolner would be depositing $1 million into the numbered account.
What came next was a meeting on the street with Kolner. Ziloubaf said Kolner never got out of his car, instead only slipping a photocopy of his passport through the window of his car to verify his identity in order to sign for the deposit.
Ziloubaf claimed he thought the money was originating from Dubai, but he “did not notice” the deposit of $1,038,744.74 was labelled as coming from the City of Saskatoon in his bank statement.
He noted his contacts in Dubai had the information for the TD bank account already.
The money was then distributed to several different accounts, with two men joining Ziloubaf in claiming they were each “an innocent victim of the fraud” and should therefore be allowed to keep their funds. The challenge involved $345,000 of the money stolen from the the city.
The two other men, Mohammad Abazari and Ibrahim Bangura, claimed they were using Ziloubaf’s service to exchange Iranian rials for Canadian dollars — which led to some of the funds being deposited in their accounts.
In response to claims they were owed the money, Justice Penny concluded that “the claimants’ remedy, if any, is against Ziloubaf or those to whom they made the alleged payments in Tehran or Dubai, not funds fraudulently stolen from the City.”
