Good afternoon.
Thank you very much for allowing me to appear before the committee this afternoon.
I am here to represent the thousands of victims of various frauds that were uncovered back in 2005. I am referring to Mount Real, Norshield and Cinar. The loss in the Mount Real case alone was approximately $120 million, and there were 1,600 victims. I was one of them.
I believe that I was invited to address this committee to give my perspective on what it is like to be a victim of this type of crime. Believe me, it is not a victimless crime. One of the Mount Real victims whom I got to know over the years was an Italian immigrant who came to Canada with very little money. He worked very hard, established a good business and raised a family. He lost approximately $2.5 million. His family told me he died a broken man. He never saw justice for his loss.
There are hundreds of other stories of people forced to delay their retirements and others forced to go back to work in their seventies. There have been marital breakdowns, stress-related illnesses and at least one suicide that I know of.
I was one of the lucky ones. I lost the $68,000 that was in my RRSP at the time. Fortunately, I was still able to retire. I retired when I was 60. I am now 74 and I've been working on this case for a long time. I became the unofficial spokesperson for many of the victims over the years.
During the trial of Lino Matteo, who was the head of Mount Real, I listened to statements given by some of the victims. It was heartbreaking to watch men in their seventies break down and cry because they had lost what they thought would be a legacy for their children. The stigma of being this kind of victim is real, and many victims have still not told their families about their loss.
Where did all the money go? We were told by the RCMP that they were unable to investigate these massive frauds because they did not have the resources to trace the money once it had left the country. The trustee of Mount Real was Raymond Chabot Grant Thornton. They were only able to recover about $5 million of the $120 million that was lost, and the costs incurred in recovering these funds, in lawyers' fees and trustees' fees, was approximately $3.5 million, which left very little to be distributed to the victims.
I am very appreciative of the work done by the investigative journalists at The Fifth Estate and EnquĂȘte, who may have shed some light on where some of this money ended up.
I am grateful to the finance committee for allowing me to testify today, and I hope that the inquiry, which was started in 2016, will be reopened into specific offshore tax havens.
Thank you very much.