Former PI Financial owner Gary Ng charged with fraud and money laundering

Gary Ng, the entrepreneur who took Canada’s asset management market by storm with a hugely publicized acquisition spree that arrived crashing down amid allegations of forgery, has been charged criminally by the RCMP.

Mr. Ng, the previous operator of PI Fiscal Corp. and a former co-operator of Bridging Finance Inc., was billed in late January by the Mounties’ Built-in Industry Enforcement Workforce (IMET), with a single depend of fraud around $5,000 and one particular count of laundering the proceeds of criminal offense.

In an e-mailed assertion, Mr. Ng’s defence lawyer, Christi Hunter, claimed Mr. Ng denies the felony allegations versus him “and intends to thoroughly defend himself by the criminal approach.”

The RCMP’s prices were not made general public at the time they were being laid, but in an e-mailed assertion, the Mounties confirmed they charged Mr. Ng on Jan. 31 and that he surrendered on Feb. 7. He was released and his initial courtroom visual appeal is set for March 25 in Toronto.

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In the e-mailed statement, the RCMP said the fraud demand stems from its investigation into allegations that Mr. Ng secured loans working with falsified collateral, and the revenue laundering demand stems from the works by using of the loans that Mr. Ng obtained.

The RCMP’s expenses follow two modern significant-profile investigations by Canadian regulators in which Mr. Ng played central roles.

The 1st of people, launched by the Financial investment Marketplace Regulatory Corporation of Canada (IIROC), alleged Mr. Ng utilised fabricated investment decision account statements to inflate his private web really worth and persuade loan companies to supply him with $172-million in loans.

A massive part of that debt was utilized to finance Mr. Ng’s buy of numerous financial investment advisory corporations, the most sizeable of which was his 2018 acquisition of PI. Mr. Ng paid out $100-million in an all-income deal to receive the Vancouver-primarily based supplier, which delivers investment banking and wealth management products and services and had $4.5-billion in assets less than management at the time.

PI is now less than the management of Miami-dependent HIG Money and Vancouver-based mostly RCM Capital, two of the loan providers that financed Mr. Ng’s purchase dependent on allegedly solid files.

IIROC’s enforcement hearing from Mr. Ng is scheduled to be read in Vancouver from May well 9 to Might 20. He has not appeared at any of the regulator’s earlier hearings, either in individual or via a authorized representative.

The regulator also alleges Mr. Ng provided falsified collateral when purchasing a 50-per-cent stake in personal debt manager Bridging Finance in the summer of 2019, and his buy landed Bridging in scorching h2o with a various regulator, the Ontario Securities Commission.

Around the time of this $50-million purchase – which furnished a non-managing interest in Bridging – Mr. Ng likened himself in media interviews to an “admiral” amassing a “fleet” of money corporations. Whilst Bridging is alleged to have been a target of the fabricated account statements at the coronary heart of IIROC’S scenario, Bridging also lent Mr. Ng’s providers extra than $131-million. These loans are now aspect of a broader investigation into Bridging by the OSC.

Bridging was put below the command of a court docket-appointed receiver in April, 2021, and the OSC has cited Bridging’s loans to Mr. Ng as portion of an alleged sample of self-dealing by some Bridging officers and executives.

In courtroom filings, the OSC faulted Bridging for not disclosing to its 26,000 buyers that it was lending to Mr. Ng at the very same it was “engaged in conversations for Ng to obtain a considerable interest” in Bridging by itself.

For its component, Bridging has pointed out that, when the allegations of falsified collateral came to mild in early 2020, Bridging’s owners – Jenny Coco and Natasha Sharpe – individually began repaying Bridging traders for the negative loans as portion of a deal to acquire again Mr. Ng’s $50-million stake in Bridging for $5.

In its most modern report to the courtroom, PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP, the receiver that now controls Bridging, also highlighted Bridging’s absence of disclosure to investors with regard to a diverse factor of its partnership with Mr. Ng.

PwC alleges in its report that in July, 2020, Bridging entered into a settlement arrangement that supplied Mr. Ng with a covenant not to sue him. PwC suggests this covenant could hinder trader restoration endeavours and that the “amounts owing less than the Ng loans could be rendered uncollectible.”

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