Judicial review overturns judgment against Princeton business owner
Published 5:00 pm Thursday, December 11, 2025
A judicial review overturned a judge’s decision to pierce the corporate veil and hold the owner of a heating company directly responsible for paying damages from a botched Princeton installation.
In a Dec. 5 decision by Justice Miriam Maisonville handed down in Penticton Court, TR3 Geothermal Services and its owner Richard John Saari won their application to overturn a post-trial decision to hold Saari and his partner directly liable to pay-out.
In September 2024, following a trial, Jacqueline Mason was awarded damages worth $46,345.93, which included the judgment, expenses, interest and a penalty payment order, after proving her case over TR3’s failure to install working radiant floor heating in her Princeton home.
A second company had to be hired after Saari and TR3 stopped work. That company testified at the trial and stated that the system Saari installed would never have been able to work, since he made fundamental errors including installing a check valve the wrong way. Saari claimed in court that the system had worked initially, despite text messages and photographic evidence indicating otherwise.
During the trial, Judge Lynette Jung had rejected an application to pierce the corporate veil and hold Saari directly liable, citing the company’s apparent health.
“I decided the defendant company was a legitimate business enterprise that had engaged in business for years and was not a sham set up to perform a wrongful act,” Jung said in an unreported January, 2025 decision cited in Maisonville’s Dec. 5 judicial review decision.
That health was directly undermined during a payment hearing on Oct. 31, 2024, when Saari said that the company had been rendered insolvent after its insurer rejected its claim, and that he planned to have the company declare bankrupcty.
At that point, despite having ruled on and rejected the application to pierce the corporate veil during the trial, Judge Jung heard another application in December from Mason to hold Saari directly liable. During that December hearing, without submitting any evidence or affadavit outside of oral submissions, Mason claimed that Saari had a trailer and a car and that the trailer had now left his property.
Saari provided an affidavit with exhibits and a supporting material binde and also testified and was cross-examined by Mason and questioned by Judge Jung. He further explained that he had entered retirement and that he had begun to wind down the company in 2017 when he moved to Princeton.
Testimony and evidence provided to the court showed that neither Saari nor his partner had collected any money, whether salary, dividend or anything else from TR3 since August 2024, and that no assets had been disposed of or transferred in an attempt to thwart judgement.
“Since September 19, 2024, they continued to pay TR3’s debts as they came up, including payments to the company’s liability insurer and accountant for the year end,” Justice Maisonville noted.
The Justice deemed Judge Jung’s decision to go forward with the application to pierce the corporate veil post-trial — without reopening the trial and while in a payment hearing — to have been an unreasonable decision.
As a result, Justice Maisonville granted the judicial review application to set aside Judge Jung’s decision to pierce the corporate veil and issue an order for seizure and sale against Saari.