Xanthoudakis denied another request to get out of jail
John Xanthoudakis has failed again in his effort to avoid serving time behind bars while he asks the Supreme Court of Canada to hear an appeal of his conviction in the Cinar fraud scandal.
On Friday, the Quebec Court of Appeal dismissed Xanthoudakis’s application to review Superior Court Justice Benoît Moore’s decision denying an interim release while he seeks to have Canada’s highest court hear his case.
A panel of three appellate court judges determined Moore made no errors in his decision.
On June 2, 2016, following trial, a jury assembled at the Montreal courthouse found Xanthoudakis, 61, and two of his accomplices — Ronald Weinberg and Lino Matteo — guilty on several counts related to how they defrauded people who invested in Cinar, a Montreal-based TV production company founded by Weinberg.
Xanthoudakis helped Weinberg transfer US$123 million in investors’ funds to a company Xanthoudakis operated in Nassau, Bahamas.
Both Matteo and Wineberg have already been granted parole on their sentences. Xanthoudakis appealed both the conviction and his eight-year sentence. He was granted a release while the appeal was pending and had spent little time behind bars until the Quebec Court of Appeal ordered in March that he report to a federal penitentiary when his appeal was rejected. He turned himself in to a penitentiary in Ste-anne-des-plaines.
“(Xanthoudakis) did not establish that (Moore’s) decision was clearly unwarranted,” the court wrote in the decision delivered on Friday. “It is worth mentioning again that the role of the review panel is not to substitute its own decision for that of the single judge, but only to determine whether or not the latter’s conclusion was clearly unwarranted.