Former Managing Director in the Mergers and Acquisitions Department of RBC Dominion Securities AndrewRankin (left) leaves a sentencing hearing at the courts of old city hall in Toronto with his lawyer Brian Greenspan (right), on Oct. 19, 2005.Louie Palu/The Globe and Mail
Former investment banker Andrew Rankin has lost his final bid to reopen a settlement agreement he reached with the Ontario Securities Commission in 2008.
The Ontario Court of Appeal announced Tuesday it will not give Mr. Rankin leave to appeal the OSC's ruling, effectively closing the door on the latest saga in a decade-long legal journey.
Mr. Rankin is a former managing partner at RBC Dominion Securities Inc. who has been on a campaign to reopen and set aside a settlement agreement he reached with the OSC in 2008 that saw him fined and banned from working in the securities industry.
He was found guilty in court in 2005 of tipping a friend about takeover deals involving RBC clients, but later had that decision overturned on appeal. Rather than attempt a second criminal trial, the OSC reached a settlement with Mr. Rankin that involved lesser penalties at an administrative hearing.
Mr. Rankin agreed in the settlement to pay $250,000 toward the OSC's investigation costs and accepted a lifetime ban from working in the securities industry or serving as a director or officer of a public company. He also received a 10-year ban from trading securities in Ontario.
In 2011, Mr. Rankin filed a rare request to overturn the settlement, saying he would never have signed it if he had known the star witness against him, Daniel Duic, was being investigated for breaching his own OSC settlement order that banned him from trading shares in Ontario.
In a decision in November, 2011, the OSC rejected the request to reopen the deal, saying Mr. Duic's trading breach was unintentional and was not a crucial matter that would likely have affected the outcome of a case against Mr. Rankin.
The panel also noted Mr. Rankin did not file his application to overturn the settlement until two years after the public announcement of Mr. Duic's trading breach, and said it meant the six-year time limit had expired for the OSC to renew its criminal proceedings against Mr. Rankin if the administrative settlement was cancelled.
Mr. Rankin, who moved to California after the OSC settlement, represented himself at his OSC hearing, and said he could have used transcripts of the OSC interviews with Mr. Duic to undermine his testimony at a second trial.
Earlier this year, the Ontario Divisional Court upheld the OSC's decision not to reopen the settlement agreement, although one of the hearing judges wrote a dissenting opinion saying the appeal should be allowed because Mr. Rankin was entitled to know everything that could affect his decision to settle.
Mr. Rankin's attempt to appeal the divisional court ruling was denied by the Ontario Court of Appeal. It does not release reasons for its decisions to allow or deny leave to appeal.
(Janet McFarland is a Globe and Mail Business Reporter.)
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Janet McFarland