• Posts by Peter J. Roberts, KC
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    Peter is a litigator with a wide range of experience, practising for over 30 years in Vancouver. For a number of years he practised criminal law before resuming civil and commercial litigation, including claims involving ...

Posted in Fraud

A Vancouver realtor, Wilbur Roshinsky, was recently suspended by the Real Estate Council of B.C. for taking advantage of a 90 year old spinster suffering from dementia.  The realtor arranged to sell the spinster’s home to a developer for a price well below market rate.  CBC reports that the transaction was only caught and cancelled when the spinster’s lawyer learned of its ...

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Posted in Banking, Commercial

At my in-laws recently, a rather overbearing friend of theirs was expounding to the gathered on the evils of banks and their obligations to provide anyone who wants one with a bank account.  Among other erroneous information, he opined that the right to have a bank account was inalienable and could not be denied by any financial institution.

Though it was not worth saying so at ...

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Posted in Civil Procedure

What is civil contempt of court? A fair question given the Ontario Court of Appeal's recent decision to uphold a 14 month sentence for civil contempt in the case of Barry Landen. Mr. Landen had defrauded the estate of his good friend Paul Penni of millions of dollars. This 14 month sentence arose not from the crime Landen committed (for which to date he has served only a 45 day ...

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Posted in Banking, Fraud

Almost the only member of the press to notice, Julius Melnitzer recently reported an Ontario Court of Appeal decision that held the Royal Bank of Canada had no right to freeze accounts belonging to one of its customers by simply starting a lawsuit.  The case turned on the application of a little known (but much loved by litigators) section of the Bank Act: section 437(2).  This ...

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Posted in Fraud

In an intersection of law and Canadian pop-culture, k.d. lang successfully defended her California judgment against her ex-manager, Annabel Lapp.  Lapp, a Canadian resident, had been k.d.’s manager for 16 years prior to November 2005.  Matters became nasty when k.d. sued Lapp in California for fraudulently handling her finances.  k.d. effectively obtained a default ...

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Posted in Banking

In a pair of companion cases, the Supreme Court of Canada unanimously turned down an opportunity to patch over a priority lacuna in the federal Bank Act, S.C. 1991, c. 46 and, instead, held such security could rank after unregistered security granted under Saskatchewan’s Personal Property Security Act, S.S. 1993, c. P-6.2.  In doing so, the Court (quite rightly) rejected a ...

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No day goes by without some new internet peril being drawn to our attention.  The most recent evil is an internet based program called Firesheep.   Like others (i.e. Wireshark, Tshark, Snort, Nmap, etc.), this program, a free download on the internet, allows users to troll cyberspace for open WiFi networks and, by doing so, access personal data and communications.  The danger in ...

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Posted in Fraud

You just discovered that one of your company’s directors or a senior employee has been engaging in a fraud.  One of the first things I get asked in situations like this is whether the conduct of the employee/director will be treated as the conduct of the company generally.  Can the company distance itself from its agent’s conduct?  It matters for a variety of reasons ...

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This blog is authored by members of the Litigation and Dispute Resolution Department. We follow new and interesting issues emerging in the legal and business communities. The wide range of experience among the members of our litigation group will provide a diverse and insightful examination of current legal trends and topics. Our goal is to provide a source of valuable information and insight on a wide variety of matters for our readers.

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