This is the story of the First Leaside Group, a residential real estate investment firm located in Uxbridge, Ont. It is not a happy story – a lot of people lost a lot of money, and the Ontario Securities Commission alleges (and the Investment Industry Regulatory Organization of Canada has already found) that this happened because First Leaside’s founder David Charles Phillips and one of its salesmen, John Russell Wilson, were unscrupulous in their business practices.
But it’s also a story about some weird legal wrangling that puts an amusing spin on an otherwise unfortunate situation, and maybe teaches us a little bit about Ontario’s unique securities regulation regime.
The easiest place to begin is in the fall of 2011 when First Leaside raised $18.6-million from investors over a two-month period. Trouble was, when raising this capital, the OSC alleges that First Leaside failed to inform investors of the contents of an OSC-requested viability study of First Leaside by the accounting firm Grant Thornton Ltd.
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Adrian Myers – Globe and Mail – September 25, 2014.
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