A lawyer, a tangled web of trusts, and $150 million that investors say disappeared.
A British Columbia court will try three lawsuits together over a collapsed real estate group, where investors allege roughly $150 million was fraudulently diverted.
The Supreme Court of British Columbia ruled on July 9, 2026 that the three related actions should be heard at the same time. Madam Justice Fitzpatrick granted the order after a June 15 hearing, with written reasons following.
The dispute grows out of the failure of the Coromandel Group, a set of companies built around Vancouver-area real estate development. Since 2023, several of its members have been in insolvency proceedings before the same court.
At the center is the main action, filed in December 2023. A group of investors says that beginning in 2016 they advanced about $150 million to a businessman to put into local real estate projects. They allege that he, along with family members and business associates, diverted those funds for their own use.
The investors also name a lawyer and his law firm, alleging the lawyer helped carry out the scheme through legal work on two developments, a project at Cambie Street and 43rd Avenue and another on Manson Street. Their claim says he knowingly assisted transfers made in breach of trust, created false legal documents, and acted with divided loyalties. It also alleges he improperly paid sale proceeds to the businessman - $8.1 million tied to the Manson project and $10.4 million tied to the Cambie project.
The lawyer denies the allegations. In his response, he says he had no knowledge of any unlawful scheme, owed no duties to the investor plaintiffs, and disbursed funds according to directions the businessman was authorized to give.
Two further lawsuits, filed in February 2025 by limited partners in the same two projects, make broadly similar claims against the lawyer and his firm. He applied to have all three actions tried together. All of the plaintiff groups opposed that request.
The court sided with the lawyer. It found enough common ground across the cases - shared questions about who his clients were, what he knew, and how the sale proceeds moved - to justify a single trial. Separate trials, the court said, would risk inconsistent findings on identical allegations and force him to answer the same questions twice.
The judge described the ownership behind the projects as "a dizzying array of corporations, limited partnerships, trusts and individuals," a structure that will require a full factual review at trial.
None of the three actions has moved past the pleadings stage. The main action is set for a ten-week trial beginning in mid-September 2028. One of the other actions is scheduled for five days starting May 31, 2027, while the third has no trial date yet.
For advisors and firms, the case is a reminder of how opaque ownership layers and fund-flow controls can leave large sums exposed, and how professional intermediaries can be drawn into disputes when investors allege their money was misused.
