CARIAD
CARIAD is the company that Jim Brown used to perpetrate his alleged scams.
CARIAD was a husband-and-wife company that operated out of a small semi- in one of the poorer parts of Toronto. One month after my memo alleging possible criminal fraud went to Dane MacCarthy, CARIAD sold their house to their children. (Their children were adults; it was his second marriage.)
Dane MacCarthy 1; The Full Legal CaseCARIAD apparently were "biologists", with no experience in Transmission Electron Microscopy (TEM) at all. Rumor has it that CARIAD were very friendly with the TEM technician (Sylvia), Jim Brown and also Don Mills. Jim Brown had sent CARIAD about $300,000 in contracts before the PII investigation.
How Much Is Jim Brown In ForCARIAD had $250,000 sitting in short-term deposits (most unusual for a small business), which is what first attracted PII’s attention. They also had extensive recent correspondence overseas, looking for employment. One of my OHT witnesses later told me that CARIAD had moved to Crete.
The Full Legal CaseWhat really fired up the PII investigation was the unusual fax they picked up in a "perimeter search", talking about laundering a US$ cheque from Indonesia in a more imaginative way. While one might argue that this doesn’t mean what it says for some obscure reason, it is hard to interpret this fax in any other way. In essence, it is a voluntary written admission of fraud. The CARIAD fax came from Crete. Despite the postal address on the fax, CARIAD was not registered as a company in Crete.
The CARIAD fax also came with a nice legal wrinkle, such that it couldn’t be used in court on a legal technicality. The fax was picked up from garbage bags outside CARIAD’s house. According to court rulings at the time, the fax still legally belonged to CARIAD (until it reached the dump), so it was not legally admissible as evidence. However, the fax was still perfectly good evidence for Maurice Strong or the Globe & Mail. (It wouldn’t be Maurice Strong’s or the Globe & Mail’s decision on whether the fax would be admissible, anyhow: it would be the court’s.) My lawyer figured that we would manage to get the fax in somehow, if the situation arose. (The law was recently changed: the CARIAD fax would now be admissible.)
By the time we had collected the Research information on TEM and the results from the PII investigation, we knew that:
CARIAD didn’t "do" TEM;
CARIAD didn’t seem to be above board as a company;
there was nothing genuine about the TEM contracts; and
CARIAD seemed to be trying to flee the country.
The only thing we could say we knew for certain about CARIAD was that they indulged in fraud.
STAGE 3. Implications of Criminal Fraud (PII)