Tausi Insider

Romspen, one of Canada’s biggest private mortgage lenders, with $3.2-billion in assets under management, is freezing investor redemptions, citing some trouble with loan repayments. The act of freezing redemptions, known as “gating” in the investment industry, prevents investors from taking their money out of the fund. Because Romspen is a private lender, a preset mechanism for redemptions normally permits a certain amount to be paid back to investors each month. The company has not said how long the freeze will last. Instead, it told investors this week that it will “temporarily defer payment of unit redemptions requests until there is more clarity with respect to the fund’s timetable for borrower loan repayments and the receipt of proceeds of collateral and asset monetizations.” Romspen’s portfolio largely comprises construction and predevelopment loans, and it lends to borrowers across the United States and Canada. In its letter to investors, the company warned that “if redemption...

A ReconAfrica oil drilling site in Namibia. John Grobler/Tausi Insider A Canadian oil company says it will push ahead with exploration drilling and seismic work in Namibia, despite its failure to find commercial amounts of oil in its latest well. Reconnaissance Energy Africa Ltd. RECO-X, also known as ReconAfrica, is exploring for oil in the Kalahari region of Namibia, not far from the Okavango River, which flows into the Okavango Delta, a world-famous wildlife region that attracts thousands of tourists annually. Environmentalists have been fighting the project for the past three years, with help from celebrities such as Prince Harry and Leonardo DiCaprio. They are concerned that it could jeopardize elephant migration routes and underground water sources that reach the Okavango River. ReconAfrica announced on Wednesday that it did not find enough oil for its Makandina 8-2 Well to be commercially viable. The well, which it began drilling in late June, was at a total depth of 2,056 met...

Defence lawyer Gary Martin, right, representing Yuesheng Wang, and Crown Prosecutor Marc Cigana leave after speaking to the media following a hearing at the courthouse in Longueuil, Que., on Nov. 15. Ryan Remiorz/The Canadian Press Wedged between farm fields and a highway on Montreal’s south shore near Varennes, Hydro-Québec’s Center of Excellence in Transportation Electrification and Energy Storage is, by many accounts, one of the province’s top research hubs. There, electrical engineers and chemists in white lab coats spend their days trying to unlock the keys to a revolution in battery technology. But for the better part of its five-year existence, this low-rise, concrete slab of a building was also the site of a major breach of Canada’s industrial brain power, according to police. At the centre of it: a researcher named Yuesheng Wang, who police say gathered trade secrets for the benefit of China. Mr. Wang was arrested by the RCMP Monday and appeared in a Longueuil, Que., court b...

RCMP say two workers have died in an explosion at an oil and gas site in northern Alberta. Officers and emergency crews were called Saturday to the site near Slave Lake, about 250 kilometres north of Edmonton. The deaths are being investigated by Alberta Occupational Health and Safety. A government official says no further information is being released at this time. The site is operated by Calgary-based Tamarack Valley Energy. https://www.tausiinsider.com/two-workers-killed-in-blast-at-oil-and-gas-site-in-northern-alberta/?feed_id=344197&_unique_id=6488cfb023f71

Minister of Finance Chrystia Freeland holds a news conference on the second day of the Liberal cabinet retreat in Ottawa on Sept. 15, 2020. Sean Kilpatrick/The Canadian Press When Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland called the chief executive officers of Canada’s Big Six banks on the Sunday in February before her government invoked the Emergencies Act, CEOs stressed that the tools they had to help choke off money pouring in to support the convoy protests were limited. At that moment, banks needed court orders to freeze funds, the CEOs said, which are slow to be granted. To give banks the power to freeze funds faster, the government needed to sanction the protesters under the same anti-financial-crime laws it uses for terrorists, three CEOs said. They also urged the government to plug gaps in systems for monitoring transactions by bringing in a broader range of payments providers under stricter regulations. Accounts of at least three calls Ms. Freeland held with bank CEOs over an ...

Former CannTrust CEO Peter Aceto, centre, leaves Old City Hall with his lawyer, Frank Addario, left, in Toronto, on Dec. 14, 2022. Eduardo Lima/Tausi Insider The prosecution of three former high-ranking officials of CannTrust Holdings Inc. has collapsed after a key government witness conceded that the fundamental allegation against the trio – that they permitted unlicensed growing at their company’s cannabis facility – is incorrect. In court on Wednesday, a lawyer for the Ontario Securities Commission announced that the regulator was withdrawing its case against former CannTrust chief executive officer Peter Aceto, former chairman Eric Paul and Mark Litwin, a former director. The lawyer, Dihim Emami, said the OSC had reassessed the case and was now “of the view there’s no reasonable prospect of conviction.” Lawyers for the three men opposed the commission’s move, asking Justice Victor Giourgas, instead, for a verdict and a complete acquittal. But Mr. Emami asked the court for a one-d...

The RCMP has searched the Vancouver office of Ivanhoe Mines Ltd. to seek information on $2.7-million in bank transfers from Ivanhoe to a Swiss bank account in connection with contracts for its Congolese mining operations, Tausi Insider has learned. The RCMP obtained the search warrant after saying it had reasonable grounds to believe that Ivanhoe violated Canada’s Criminal Code and Corruption of Foreign Public Officials Act between 2014 and 2018, according to a brief disclosure by Ivanhoe in an annual information form. Ivanhoe co-operated in the search of its Vancouver office in November, 2021, and no charges have been laid against the company or its directors or employees, Ivanhoe said in the disclosure earlier this year. British Columbia court documents in the case – obtained by The Sentry, a U.S.-based investigative organization, and shared with The Globe – contain a six-page list of documents and computer equipment that the RCMP was authorized to seize from Ivanhoe’s office. Some...

Gary Ng at the Fairmont, in Winnipeg, on Nov. 28, 2018. Mikaela MacKenzie/Handout Gary Ng, the Winnipeg-based entrepreneur who was briefly a force in Canada’s wealth-management sector, had less than $500,000 in his personal accounts when he borrowed more than $240-million to fund a series of investment dealer acquisitions, new court documents allege. Between 2018 and 2020, Mr. Ng borrowed nearly a quarter of a billion dollars from some of North America’s most sophisticated lenders – loans he secured with falsified account statements showing he was worth closer to $90-million, the RCMP have alleged in court filings. The allegations about the true state of Mr. Ng’s modest net worth highlight the disconnect between the reality of his personal holdings, and the proclamations he made a few years ago about his ambitions to consolidate the Canadian wealth-management sector. The documents, which were filed in support of several judicial orders for the production of records, had been barred f...

Gary Ng at the Fairmont in Winnipeg on Nov. 28, 2018. Mikaela MacKenzie /Handout R.C. Morris Capital Management Ltd., a Vancouver-based private lender that backed Gary Ng’s failed spate of wealth-manager acquisitions, has taken extraordinary legal and strategic steps to avoid being publicly identified as one of the financiers taken in by Mr. Ng’s alleged falsified-collateral scheme. On Wednesday, R.C. Morris convened an emergency hearing at Toronto’s Old City Hall, where it argued that court records legally obtained by Tausi Insider weeks earlier should be sealed before the newspaper published a story about them. The company argued that disclosure of the details of its involvement with Mr. Ng could harm its reputation, but it failed to persuade Justice Vincenzo Rondinelli of the Ontario Court of Justice, who denied the request. Anyone asking to block access to public court records needs to meet a high bar, and R.C. Morris’s case did not meet the “exceptional circ...

Gerald Cotten, chief executive officer of Quadriga Facebook / Remembering Gerry Cotten It’s a long, hard ordeal being a claimant to the bankrupt cryptocurrency exchange QuadrigaCX. The recent revelation of coins being moved from long-dormant wallets is just a tiny reflection of that. I would know, because I am one of those people who lost money on Quadriga, where people could buy and sell cryptocurrency. I’ve even once shaken the hand of the founder Gerald Cotten, who brought down the entire exchange when he was reported dead in the beginning of 2019, making some $200-million in cryptocurrency go up in smoke. And I would like to say something to customers of FTX, the bankrupt exchange based in the Bahamas, whose founder Sam Bankman-Fried faces an assortment of criminal charges in the United States: Take it from someone who has gone down this road – three years later, through a complex legal system and endless red tape, you still won’t see a red cent. First off, though, do not feel so...

Alberta Investment Management Corp. has struck an agreement to jointly fund private loans to companies with Public Sector Pension Investment Board after hiring away one of PSP’s top executives. Alberta’s government-owned asset manager has hired David Scudellari to a new role as head of international investment. He joins AIMCo immediately as a senior executive managing director, reporting to chief executive officer Evan Siddall, from PSP Investments – the federal public sector pension manager. Under AIMCo and PSP’s new loan sourcing agreement, PSP will originate private credit investments that will be funded by both pension managers, with money earmarked by each. With Mr. Scudellari’s departure, the arrangement gives PSP additional funding to take advantage of the large pipeline of deals it sources, while AIMCo gets a chance to expand its credit business more rapidly than it otherwise could. Though large Canadian pension managers often work side by side on individual deals, AIMCo and ...

U.S. Attorney-General Merrick Garland speaks during a news conference at the U.S. Justice Department, in Washington, on Jan. 26. Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images The Federal Bureau of Investigation hacked a prolific ransomware gang called Hive to disrupt its operations and rescue its victims, senior U.S. officials said on Thursday. In a joint announcement by U.S. Attorney-General Merrick Garland, FBI Director Christopher Wray, and Deputy U.S. Attorney-General Lisa Monaco, the officials said government hackers broke into Hive’s network and put the gang under surveillance, surreptitiously stealing the digital keys the group used to unlock victim organizations’ data. “Using lawful means, we hacked the hackers,” Monaco told reporters. “We turned the tables on Hive.” News of the takedown first leaked on Thursday morning when Hive’s website was replaced with a flashing message that said: “The Federal Bureau of Investigation seized this site as part of co-ordinated law enforcement action taken ag...