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A Calgary fraudster who used $6 million of his clients\u2019 money to purchase high-risk oil and gas stock from a company where his close friend was a vice-president has seen one of his three convictions overturned.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Jeffrey Ber was handed a seven-year prison sentence for two convictions of fraud over $5,000 and one conviction for accepting a secret commission of $104,000.\u00a0<\/p>\n
On Friday, the Alberta Court of Appeal overturned the secret commission offence and ordered a new trial.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Six years of the seven-year sentence was for the fraud convictions. One year was to be served consecutively for the secret commission offence.<\/p>\n
Ber had been released on bail pending the outcome of the conviction appeal. He must now turn himself in, but could apply again to be released pending the outcome of his upcoming sentence appeal.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Close friend a VP <\/p>\n
Ber’s crimes began in 2017, when he was close friends with Blackbird Energy’s vice-president of business development, Josh Mann.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Details of the frauds come from the trial judge\u2019s conviction decision.<\/p>\n
In 2017, Blackbird was a small, publicly traded, Calgary-based oil and gas company.<\/p>\n
In the early part of the year, Blackbird had a goal of raising $80 million through a new share issuance to be offered at an initial price of $0.55 per share.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Cashed $104K cheque<\/p>\n
On March 14, 2017, Ber sold millions of dollars of his TD clients’ existing investments and then placed $6 million of the high-risk Blackbird shares in their investment accounts.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The move instantly put many of the accounts “offside with their designated risk tolerance,” noted trial judge Justice Eleanor Funk.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Ten days after he purchased the high-risk shares in Blackbird, Ber cashed a cheque for $104,000 from Blackbird Energy.<\/p>\n
In her conviction decision, Funk noted Ber’s spending patterns in the weeks leading to the new share issue was evidence that he expected to come into a significant amount of money.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Spent $70K in 4 weeks<\/p>\n
Over a four-week period, Ber made $70,000 in credit card purchases, including $43,000 for a watch.<\/p>\n
On March 29, 2017, Ber deposited the $104,000 cheque from Blackbird and immediately made a credit card payment of $75,000.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Ber’s invoice to the company referenced “consulting services” performed from February to April 2017.<\/p>\n
In its decision released Friday, the panel of judges sided with defence lawyer Jennifer Ruttan, who argued that the trial judge did not consider the uncontradicted evidence of two Blackbird executives who described the payment to Ber as a “general and administrative expense for consulting fees.\u201d<\/p>\n
‘Consulting services’<\/p>\n
Ruttan also pointed to evidence that the company\u2019s controller, who was a CPA, testified that he was satisfied with reclassifying the cheque to Ber for “consulting services.\u201d<\/p>\n
The higher court took issue with the original conclusion that the only reasonable inference was that the payment was consideration for the 2017 share placement, given the evidence about reclassifying the cheque was not contradicted by other witnesses and was not rejected by the trial judge.\u00a0<\/p>\n
It\u2019s not known if the Crown will pursue a second trial on the secret commission charge.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Listen to this article Estimated 3 minutes The audio version of this article is generated by AI-based technology.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":733380,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[45,49,48],"class_list":["post-733379","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-business","tag-business","tag-ca","tag-canada"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/733379","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=733379"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/733379\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/733380"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=733379"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=733379"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=733379"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}