Docu-play unravels notorious local Ponzi scheme
B.C. has often been called Canada’s Wild West for its relatively unregulated financial dealings. The current run of questionable real estate transactions and shadow flipping has plenty of precedent. Remember the Vancouver Stock Exchange, once dubbed “the scam capital of the world” by Forbes Magazine?
Then there was Rashida Samji. The Vancouver notary public ran a Ponzi scheme from 2003 to 2012 that scammed more than 200 local investors out of more than $100 million. In 2016 she was sentenced to six years in prison. Just this month, her appeal was dismissed by the Supreme Court of Canada.
Meanwhile, her victims have received a pittance in compensation.
Drawn from public testimony and victim interviews, court transcripts and B.C. Securities Commission investigations, Theatre Conspiracy artistic producer Tim Carlson’s new documentary play, Victim Impact, tries to unravel the confusing truth of what actually happened, how it did, and its devastating effect on the people whose trust was betrayed and life savings stolen.
The information the play compiles is revelatory, unnerving and sad. But director Jiv Parasram presents it in an only fitfully successful form.
Elements of Parasram’s approach are very effective. We first meet Samji (Nimet Kanji, excellent throughout) in flashback scenes constructed from her own self-serving testimony, with surtitles projected above Joel Grinke’s set of piled-up banker’s boxes indicating when and how this information was sourced.
Samji herself was victimized, she claims, forced to set up the scheme by shadowy figures who appear literally as shadows behind a scrim.
We also see her interviews with a BCSC investigator (Jenn Griffin, who plays multiple roles along with Munish Sharma, Risha Nanda and Allan Morgan). Samji seems distraught, baffled and baffling.
She was just a pawn, she says, fearing for her safety from “these Indian people.” The phrase “these Indian people” then appears in ironic mocking surtitles.
The irony and mockery are much less successful in vaudeville-style scenes in which Samji lightheartedly explains the pyramidal nature of Ponzi schemes, investment counsellor Arvin Patel (Sharma) gives his version of how Samji seduced him into becoming her confederate and a court-appointed receiver and trustee (Sharma and Nanda) dance their way through the process of compensating victims, accompanied by recorded cheers and boos.
The intention is black comic contrast, but the staging isn’t slick enough to make these interludes work as well as they should. It’s a relief when they’re followed by genuine victim-impact statements performed as serious monologues. David Mesiha’s overwrought soundscape is mostly redundant.
A scene in which Samji’s lawyer (Morgan) interrupts the investigator’s every question with repeated rote objections while Samji explains how envelopes full of cash passed back and forth between her, Patel and the shadowy Mr. Chatur best establishes the bleakly absurdist quality of the entire event.
When the stylization and sometimes confusing chronology don’t get in the way of the information, we learn unsettling things about the behaviour and perhaps even complicity of a local credit union and a couple of banks in the scam, as well as the naivete and willing blindness of investors who didn’t think to ask how they could receive annual returns of 12 to 40 per cent and never get a T4A.
Along with the play, Theatre Conspiracy has set up an evolving podcast, Victim Impact: The Fraudcast, through which they continue to explore one of Vancouver’s most common, but least attractive, traditions.