Disgraced former investment adviser Ian Thow is hitting back at the B.C. Securities Commission, claiming the commission’s pursuit of a $250,000 fine it levied against him 10 years ago is tantamount to an abuse of process.
In court documents filed in Vancouver last week, Thow claims the BCSC abused the process by taking no steps to collect the fine over the last decade, permitted interest to accrue and is pushing for the payment only as a result of media and political pressure.
“Bringing this action on the eve of the expiry date of the 10-year limitation period is oppressive and constitutes an abuse of process,” Thow said in his response.
In November, the BCSC filed suit for $250,000 in fines and interest Thow has not paid.
Thow had been ordered by the commission to pay a $6-million administrative penalty for contravening the B.C. Securities Act in 2007. That figure was later reduced to $250,000 by the B.C. Court of Appeal.
The BCSC filed the claim late last year because the 10-year deadline for enforcing the judgment was approaching.
In his response to the claim, Thow argues that because the BCSC was not in the habit of collecting fines and penalties — in order to allow fraud victims to recover as much as possible from their fraudsters — that it would have been reasonable to assume it would not seek to collect the $250,000.
He also alleges the BCSC was only stepping up its collection efforts in order to deal with the media and political pressure that came from a story in 2017 published by the Vancouver Sun that showed the BCSC collected only two per cent of the $510 million in fines it had issued.
“Further, the action being undertaken by the [BCSC] in seeking to renew the judgment is a further abuse of process in that it is being brought solely for the purpose of pressuring the defendant to make payments in relation to the restitution order and not for the purpose of collecting upon the judgment,” Thow wrote in his filing.
In a statement, BCSC director of communications Pam MacDonald would only confirm that Thow filed a response to the application to renew the judgment against him.
“We renewed this judgment in November in order to preserve our ability to collect funds,” she said. “We will address Thow’s response through the normal court process.”
Thow was found guilty and jailed in 2010 for defrauding 20 clients of $8 million, the total that the Crown felt it was able to prove.
At his trial, the Crown characterized Thow’s actions as a classic Ponzi scheme.
He took money from clients for schemes that included investing in a Jamaican bank and short-term loans for developers. He never made those investments.
The RCMP Integrated Market Enforcement Team led a five-year investigation into Thow, a former Berkshire Investment Group vice-president, based on allegations he cheated clients and friends out of more than $32 million.
Thow, who was granted parole in the fall of 2012 and is no longer under the jurisdiction of the Correctional Service of Canada or the Parole Board of Canada, has been living in the Fraser Valley, where he has worked for a landscaping firm and paying $100 a month for restitution to his former clients.
A court order requires him to pay back $3.8 million.
