High-flying lawyer goes on trial for writing bad cheque allegedly to cover for collapsing firm | CBC News

Nicholas Cartel is self-representing against criminal charge stemming from probe into $7M embezzlement

A Toronto lawyer who co-founded a law firm with his wife that collapsed spectacularly three years ago, after millions of dollars in client money was discovered missing from the firm's trust account, went on trial Monday on a fraud charge stemming from the police investigation into the case.

The alleged fraud occurred in February 2023, when Cartel & Bui LLP was handling a property sale for a client. The law firm needed to pay out $2.22 million in proceeds to the client but didn't have sufficient funds in its trust account because Bui had been embezzling money from it for years, according to her own evidence in a separate civil case.

The February 2023 incident foreshadowed a series of events in which more than 25 property owners and buyers in southern Ontario ran into problems closing on real estate deals because money was missing from the Cartel & Bui trust account.

Cartel is not facing criminal charges in relation to those other cases, and has long maintained his innocence. He says he operated a separate legal practice at the firm focused on class actions and litigation, while the theft of client money occurred in the real estate side of the business run by his wife, Singa Bui.

He also maintains that prosecutors have improperly withheld evidence from him and misleadingly presented other evidence. At the outset of his trial Monday, he told the court he intends to bring an application under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms to have his criminal charge stayed.

At the start of Monday's trial in provincial court in Toronto, prosecutor Dihim Emami called a witness from Royal Bank of Canada's investigations department to testify about records associated with the personal chequing account on which the $300,000 cheque was drawn.

He said that because of that, a $300,000 cheque would have failed to cash, and the receiving bank could have been at risk of losing the money if it was unable to recover it from the person who wrote the cheque.

Cartel later asked Holder whether it was possible the account was in fact a joint account at the time the bad cheque was written, which Holder agreed was possible.

A second witness, from TD Bank, where the law firm had its trust account, began testifying Monday afternoon about transactions in that account and is expected to resume Tuesday.

Cartel has already spent 30 days in jail over the collapse of his firm, after a judge in separate civil lawsuits against him and his wife ruled in August 2024 that he had committed contempt of court by failing to produce records or answer questions about where the missing trust-account money went.

He is also on the hook for millions of dollars in default judgments against him obtained by former clients of his firm, though has said he will contest them.