Suit alleges ‘abusive’ search of rabbi’s home
Seeks $230K in damages after ‘negligent’ probe
MONTREAL • Rabbi Momi Pinto has a beard and wears a yarmulke, just like the man from whom he bought his Montreal home in 2012.
According to court documents, that is where the similarity between the two men ends — and yet it was allegedly enough for Quebec’s securities regulator to conduct an “abusive” search of Pinto’s home last September.
In a lawsuit filed this month at t he Montreal courthouse, Pinto and his family are seeking $230,000 in damages from the Autorité des marchés financiers and two of its investigators. They allege that in its hunt for evidence related to online gambling company Amaya Inc., the AMF relied on outdated registry information and a “grossly negligent” investigation to search their house.
Pinto’s lawyer, Julius Grey, said the “humiliating and invasive” search is a symptom of a larger problem. “It is the high- handedness of many government institutions today. They think they have a right to do whatever they want to do,” Grey said.
Sylvain Théberge, a spokesman for the AMF, said the regulator plans to contest the lawsuit and would not comment further. It has not yet filed a defence with the court.
It was 6:45 a.m. on Sept. 12 when six AMF officers and two uniformed police officers showed up at the door of Pinto’s modest house in Montreal’s Côte- des- Neiges neighbourhood.
According to the court documents, Pinto and his wife clearly identified themselves and said they had bought the house more than five years earlier from the subject of the search warrant, Yosef Ifergan. The lawsuit claims the AMF was aware that Ifergan had moved to Calgary.
With police vehicles parked outside, investigators spent more than six hours searching the family’s house, mobile phones and computers, the lawsuit alleges. “The whole endeavor was very traumatizing to the Plaintiff family, especially the children, who required a visit with a social worker to calm their nerves,” the lawsuit says.
Amaya’s founder David Baazov and five co- accused face insider- trading charges brought by the AMF. They are seeking to have the charges dismissed on the grounds that the regulator was slow to disclose evidence. Amaya is now known as The Stars Group Inc. and has moved its operations from Montreal to Toronto.
The search warrant application targeting Ifergan, which mentioned Baazov by name, alleged that Pinto’s address was found in a registry of Amaya shareholders.
But the lawsuit claims that the AMF knew Ifergan was living in Calgary and not at his former Montreal address. The registry of shareholders presented by the AMF to a justice of the peace to obtain the search warrant contained information that was between three and seven years out of date, the lawsuit alleges. A land registry search would have revealed that Ifergan was no longer the house’s owner, “but this information was never disclosed to the Justice of the Peace.”
Instead, AMF investigator Laurianne Carriere said she had twice recently observed Ifergan entering or leaving the house. “Plaintiff Pinto and Mr. Ifergan look completely different in their appearance, aside from the fact both men have beards and wear Jewish skullcaps,” the lawsuit says.
It continues that Carriere “was, at best, grossly negligent in her duties when providing the only evidence of Mr. Ifergan’s nexus to the house and at worst, deliberately misleading, in her attestation of a positive identification.”
Fellow AMF i nvestigator Xavier Saint Pierre, who neglected to disclose that land registry records show Ifergan i s no l onger the property owner, displayed “extreme i ncompetence,” the lawsuit says. His actions exposed “innocent people to the abuses that the probable cause requirement seeks to avoid.”
The lawsuit seeks $ 105,000 in damages for Pinto, $ 35,000 for his wife, $ 25,000 for their three children and $ 65,000 in punitive damages.