A December ruling sided with the financial regulator that Earle Pasquill must forfeit any future payments from his pension
A B.C. man found to have defrauded hundreds of investors out of more than $31 million a decade ago has been ordered to surrender a retirement fund worth millions to the B.C. Securities Commission.
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Earle Pasquill and others promoted the Freedom Investment Club to nearly 700 clients in 2008, raising $21.7 million without disclosing the financial condition of the companies. They also raised about $9.9 million from more than 300 investors in a company called FIC Foreclosure, telling them the money would be invested in foreclosed properties.
In 2014, a commission panel found that most of the money was used for unsecured loans to other companies in the FIC group.
In a B.C. Supreme Court ruling this month, Pasquill was ordered to pay the commission more than $36 million from life income fund accounts he holds at Canaccord Genuity Corp.
Pasquill was banned from capital markets in a 2015 ruling and ordered, along with Michael Lathigee and the corporate entities the two were involved in, to pay $21.7 million and Pasquill was also hit with an administrative penalty of $15 million. An appeal of the orders failed.
“Pasquill acknowledges that he has not made any payment towards his debt to the commission,” said the judge. All that’s been collected is $429,000 from Lathigee and $242,000 from bankruptcy proceedings involving one of the FIC companies.
Pasquill argued that he is entitled to withdrawals from the income fund of $75,000 a year, and he pulled that annual amount in January 2024. The BCSC went to court demanding that those retirement payments stop.
The commission is only able to get a court order for the funds after legislative changes about forfeitures in the past five years. The judge ruled that those changes make a forfeiture order now permitted despite the amount of time that has passed since the original commission ruling in this case.
Pasquill failed to convince the court that his life income fund was not technically a pension and was therefore exempt from the new forfeiture rules, instead agreeing with the commission’s argument that the funds are “payments that constitute a pension.”
Pasquill argued that the life income fund was “completely unrelated to the conduct that gave rise to the commission’s orders,” because the pension was earned when he was an employee of Eaton’s through 1994, was also rejected.
The judge noted that “it does not appear that the forfeiture of payments from the life income fund accounts will have a substantially prejudicial impact on Mr. Pasquill’s personal or family circumstances,” — in other words, that he doesn’t appear to need the money.
In an emailed statement, Pasquill’s lawyer John Sullivan said: “We are carefully considering the Supreme Court decision with our client, Mr. Pasquill, including with respect to a possible appeal. As the matter remains before the courts we will withhold further comment at this time.”
With a file from Dan Fumano.