Man who bilked investors fined $480,309

A B.C. man who illegally raised more than $2.6 million has been ordered to pay nearly half a million dollars by a B.C. Securities Commission tribunal.

The commission panel has ordered Prabhjot Singh Bakshi to pay an administrative penalty of $100,000. He and SBC Financial Group Inc. have also been ordered to pay the B.C. Securities Commission $380,309, which is the amount Bakshi personally received.

Bakshi has not paid and the B.C. Securities Commission would not say what plan they had to try to collect the penalties. “We develop a unique collections strategy for every case where money is owing,” said spokesman Andrew Poon in a written statement.

In a 2017 investigation, the Vancouver Sun found that more than 80 fraudsters who had harmed thousands of investors in the past decade — in B.C., other parts of Canada, the U.S. and as far away as Switzerland — had failed to pay penalties issued by the securities commission. During that period, the commission collected less than two per cent of $510 million in penalties.

As part of the tribunal ruling, Bakshi has been banned from working in the province’s capital markets for 10 years. His company, SBC Financial, which has gone bankrupt, has been banned from the markets for 10 years.

The tribunal found that Bakshi breached the province’s securities laws by trading in loans between 2010 and 2014 that offered high rates of return. Bakshi and a pair of finders, who earned commissions by steering business his way, raised $2.675 million during four years the scheme was in place.

During the period, Bashi and his company were not registered to sell securities in B.C. They did not issues prospectuses, which would detail the business and its risks, for any of the investments.

In testimony during the tribunal hearing, investors said they had lost all their money except a small payment of interest.

Bakshi and SBC Financial had also offered investors an interest in a land sale in Hawaii that turned out to be bogus, although the tribunal dismissed allegations of fraud because it found the land transactions were not securities.

In issuing its ruling, the tribunal stated: “This is a case that involved both significant financial and other harm to the investors and substantial enrichment to the respondents as a consequence of their misconduct.”

The commission has acknowledged its poor penalty collection rate, but said it’s the nature of the fraudulent activity and the perpetrators that makes collection difficult and unlikely.

Poon said a significant collections tool is the ability to register decisions with the B.C. Supreme Court, which gives the same force of a court judgment. It allows the commission to try to collect penalties and lost money by garnishing bank accounts, seizing personal property and going after property.

A Richmond house Bakshi owned was sold in 2013 and he has a loan on a 2012 Fiat 500 car, according to B.C. Assessment and B.C. Personal Property Registry records.