Businessman Nazim Gillani appears before the Commons government operations committee in Ottawa on April 28, 2010.Sean Kilpatrick
Ontario prosecutors have dropped a charge of fraud against Nazim Gillani, the financier at the centre of the affair that resulted in the ouster of former cabinet minister Helena Guergis from the federal Conservative caucus.
Assistant Crown attorney Jeffrey Costain announced in a Newmarket, Ont., courtroom Thursday morning that the evidence against Mr. Gillani "does not meet the necessary standard of a reasonable prospect of conviction."
The charge, which was laid after building store RONA was defrauded of $1.4-million in 2009, was unrelated to the allegations that ignited Ottawa in April.
At that time, Toronto private investigator Derrick Snowdy approached a lawyer for the Conservative Party and alleged that Ms. Guergis's husband, former MP Rahim Jaffer, was trying to help Mr. Gillani secure public funds for green energy projects and had boasted about his connections on Parliament Hill. In response, Prime Minister Stephen Harper expelled Ms. Guergis from caucus and referred the matter to the RCMP.
On Wednesday, the Mounties announced that no charges would be laid against either Ms. Guergis, nor Mr. Jaffer, and the file was closed.
And while Thursday's withdrawal of the fraud charge against Mr. Gillani had nothing to do with that political scandal, Mr. Gillani's lawyer Brian Greenspan said it was part of whole package of "innuendo and suspicion," as well as media coverage, that deeply hurt his client.
York Regional Police originally laid the charge against Mr. Gillani in November after a temporary RONA employee transferred about $1.4-million from the company to a Hong Kong bank account in a bid to defraud the chain.
When police tracked down the owner of the account, Xiabong Ben Wang, in Hong Kong, he told them Mr. Gillani and one of his associates, former Toronto Argonauts football player Michael Mihelic, had told him they would pay him $60,000 if he were to accept some wire transfers and disperse the money to other foreign accounts.
However, police could find no banking records or wire transfers to support the allegation that Mr. Gillani was involved in the theft, and the Crown's office elected not to prosecute.
Speaking outside court, Mr. Greenspan said there was no basis for anyone to believe that Mr. Gillani knew anything about the fraud, and he lashed out at the media for the way it has portrayed Mr. Gillani.
"There was a certain level of suspicion that was, quite frankly, over the past months fostered by the press. There's been innuendo and suspicion without hard facts. There's been false rumours that have been perpetrated by questionable sources and now, one by one, these sources have been demonstrated to simply be unreliable and false."
Mr. Greenspan confirmed that Mr. Gillani and Mr. Wang - the recipient of the stolen RONA funds - did have a business relationship where Mr. Gillani was to wire funds to Hong Kong, but said it had nothing to do with the defrauding of RONA. He declined to explain what that business relationship was, saying: "I don't have those facts."
Greg McArthur