Latest update April 25th, 2024 12:59 AM
Feb 23, 2014 News
The leadership of Guyana’s judiciary is to probe yet another Guyanese lawyer who has run afoul of the law while practicing overseas.
This has resulted in him being struck off the list of attorneys eligible to ply their trade in Canada where he committed the offence.
However, he is still operating openly in Guyana.
Attorney General Anil Nandlall told reporters on Friday that while “I have not yet received formal notification about the (Canadian) case,” he has nevertheless forwarded correspondence to Chancellor Carl Singh about the issue of Attorney Vishnu “Joey” Poonai being disbarred by judicial authorities in Canada after he was convicted and served time for committing frauds that involved millions of dollars.
The former Canadian based lawyer was ordered by the Milton Superior Court back in 2007, to pay CND$59,000in restitution to several banks before serving his three and a half years prison term for mortgage fraud. Poonai was further disbarred by the Upper Law Society of Upper Canada.
Nandlall confirmed however that the members of the Guyana Bar Association (GBA) have expressed concern over the issue. This written concern, he added, has been dispatched to the Chancellor. “Someone from the Bar Association wrote to me and I forwarded the letter to the Chancellor,” the AG said.
President of the local Bar Association Ronald Burch-Smith told media operatives that a member of the organization’s Executive Council-in a personal capacity-wrote the AG last November expressing concerns over the disbarred lawyer.
Secretary to the Bar Christopher Ram also confirmed making the issue known to senior judiciary officials.
Poonai told Kaieteur News that he will continue to practice here since he was admitted to Guyana’s Bar, “long before” he was admitted to the Canadian and UK Bars. He said his, “problem in Canada has nothing to do with what I am doing here.” “I am licensed to practice in Guyana and until somebody stops me… I will practice here.”
According to the online report from Law Times, Poonai, the Brampton Ontario lawyer defrauded four financial institutions of some $4M. A 99-page agreed statement said that the former real estate lawyer admitted to engaging “in professional misconduct and that the appropriate penalty was immediate disbarment.”
The law society said that Poonai was involved in 13 counts of professional misconduct, including acting as the solicitor in 49 mortgage transactions between 1997 and 2003 where he knowingly assisted in a scheme to obtain mortgage funds from mortgagees under false pretences, in what the court called a “flip fraud.”
The total aggregated loss to the financial institutions (the rest was covered by insurance) was $2,853,403, according to the ruling from Poonai’s criminal trial.
The lawyer was arrested in October 2003, and pleaded not guilty to the initial set of charges during his trial. At one point, he claimed that the Law Society of Upper Canada had given him permission to do the flips. The frauds occurred when a property was purchased around its market value, conveyed immediately afterwards for a falsely inflated, significantly higher price to a second buyer who was not a bona fide buyer and mortgage funds were advanced based on the higher second selling price. The difference between the funds needed to close the first deal and the mortgage for the second deal is the profit for the fraudsters, with the mortgage then falling into default.
In these lucrative flips, Poonai or another lawyer “acting in concert with him” would act for all the parties including the lending institution, without fully apprising the lender of the circumstances of the transaction.
In one of the transactions, the report said, the property saw a 2.123-per-cent increase in price over the two-week period between the first agreement and second agreement, resulting in a $275,999 profit. Another property increased by 1.508 per cent over four days.
The agreed statement notes that Poonai “admits that the transactions were dishonest and fraudulent and that he was aware of their dishonest and fraudulent nature.”
The report went on to say that in October 2003, Poonai was also charged with five counts of fraud over $5,000 relating to 12 real estate transactions between April 2002 and May 2003. The court lists the Royal Bank of Canada, the Bank of Montreal, CIBC Mortgages Inc., and Scotia Mortgage Corp., as being defrauded in the schemes.
While the misconduct proceedings against him were initiated in 2003, in 2004 Poonai agreed to an interim suspension in exchange for an adjournment sine die of the law society proceeding, pending the outcome of the criminal trial.
He was found guilty on December 22, 2006 of four counts of fraud over $5,000 and pleaded guilty to an additional count of fraud over $5,000 on March 30.
In December, Poonai was found guilty of professional misconduct for providing legal services while suspended and destroying client property. At that point, he was ordered suspended for two years. Ten days later, he was convicted of four counts of criminal fraud in the Ontario Superior Court, with Justice John Murray concluding: “Mr. Poonai acted in a manner that reasonable, decent persons would consider dishonest and unscrupulous.”
It was noted by the Law Times that two other lawyers – Pretam Kaur Purewal and Patience Boatemaa Whyte – were also involved in the frauds. It was reported that, “They knowingly assisted in or encouraged dishonesty, fraud, crime, and/or illegal conduct or to have become the dupe of clients who were engaged in dishonesty, fraud, crime, and/or illegal conduct, with respect to several properties.” Whyte was given permission to resign in January and Purewal was disbarred on March 19.
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