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Empty Dreams: Promised millions in return, investors still waiting for the payout
Michael Laforet is pictured in Windsor, Ont., Saturday, January 12, 2013. (DAX MELMER/The Windsor Star)
Michael Laforet was promised a life of wealth, comfort and ease for trusting his life savings to DSC Lifestyle Services, but much like his investments, those promises haven’t paid out.
Laforet, a 51-year-old former Windsor resident and Ford pipe fitter who now works as a plumber in the greater Toronto area, invested his Ford pension, retirement savings and thousands of additional dollars into various programs and investment deals promoted by Bruce Blair, a former co-worker at Ford, and his brother Roger Blair, a life insurance salesman based in the Toronto area. Returns came in as promised at first and Laforet started working on commission marketing the program to friends, eventually being named a “regional director” of the personal finance company.
Did you invest money through DSC Lifestyle Services, Solutions 21 Financial or any of the other associated organizations mentioned in this article? The Windsor Star wants to hear from you. Contact reporter Claire Brownell at cbrownell@windsorstar.com or 519-255-6882.
Laforet has dreamed of retiring at 55 since he was a teenager. Four years away from that deadline, all of his retirement savings and his Ford pension are on the line, along with tens of thousands more in promised commission he had counted on to pay off debts before hanging up his hat.
But Laforet points out that at least he’s still working, unlike other Windsorites who lost money. One woman who contacted The Star and did not give permission to be identified said her elderly parents lost her father’s Chrysler buyout to investments promoted by the Blairs, with her father falling seriously ill soon after.
“We just recently found out that he’s developed stomach cancer and I think it’s from the stress. He’s one of your typical European men that just keeps everything bottled inside. This was their little nest egg,” the woman said. “The last time I went to speak with Mr. [Bruce] Blair, he wanted me to sign one of those confidentiality papers where you can’t go anywhere else. I lost it… I was like, are you kidding me? You want me to be all hush hush, because you don’t want anyone else to know, and you messed up my parents? I took the paper and I left in a huff after a couple of choice words.”
Laforet and other Windsor residents appear to have fallen victim to the same illegal investment deal that has cost Canadians across the country millions of dollars, according to a ruling from the British Columbia Securities Commission. Jeff Eshun, one of the principal promoters and a director of many of the affiliated companies and organizations, and his west coast associate Maisie Smith were recently found guilty of selling investments without a licence and ordered to repay $5.7 million along with fines totalling $1.25 million.
After several emails and phone calls to Bruce Blair over the course of two weeks were met with silence, The Star caught up with him at his Ouellette Avenue office. Bruce declined to answer specific questions about where the missing money is and why investors haven’t received it, but said he has total confidence that the programs he promoted are legal and legitimate.
“The void gets you wondering, frustrated, is it going to happen or not? That’s normal,” he said. “I’m not going to dramatize and create some negative aura… I don’t want to add to the pot or slow anything down.”
Roger Blair and Eshun did not respond to multiple requests for comment sent over two weeks. Roger Blair sent an email on Jan. 25 asking for more details about Laforet’s allegations, but never replied after The Star provided the information.
Instead, Roger Blair and Eshun contacted Laforet through text messages and emails, urging him not to go public and claiming they were on the verge of turning things around – a story Laforet has heard before.
“We are not running away from the obligations to the base,” Eshun wrote in an email forwarded to The Star. “We are at the positive turning point in the drama and the good news is coming.”
But Laforet has waited long enough. And so have the people he convinced to invest their money as well.
“We have clients who didn’t have a mortgage – now they have a mortgage. Because they took the money out and it never got put back again. They’re retired now. It just kept snowballing and snowballing,” he said. “I’m angry. Somebody’s got to do something about this. This is just getting way out of hand.”
Promotional powerpoint presentations obtained by The Star that Laforet and other salespeople were given to market DSC Lifestyle Services in 2007 include a picture of Eshun and Roger Blair standing side by side, with the caption “The Founders.” Five years later, Eshun and his west coast associate Maisie Smith would admit to the British Columbia Securities Commission that they were selling investments without a licence, with the commission finding the two were dishonest to investors about where the money was going in a Jan. 9 decision.
The commission charged Eshun and Smith after the publication of a six-part series of articles by Vancouver Sun reporter David Baines. Baines wrote about a grocery cashier in Burnaby, B.C., whose story is very similar to Laforet’s – she moved her life savings into questionable investments promoted by Eshun and Roger Blair and became a regional director with DSC Lifestyles until the money suddenly stopped flowing.
The B.C. securities commission found that Eshun and Smith told 81 investors they would purchase “consumer secured notes” with their money through the company JV Raleigh, raising $5.7 million between July 2006 and January 2009. Instead, they funnelled it into companies that Eshun, Smith and Roger Blair are directors of, with Eshun also writing himself cheques totalling about $150,000.
The commission found that transfers totalling $1.5 million went from JV Raleigh to DSC Lifestyles Services, whose directors are Eshun and Blair.
“The respondents took $5.7 million from 81 investors on false pretences. There is no evidence that the investors have any hope of recovering any part of their investment. The respondents have shown no contrition,” the commission’s findings say.
The commission found Eshun and Smith guilty of securities violations, permanently banning them from selling investments. The commission also ordered them to repay $5.7 million collected from 81 investors and fined them $750,000 and $500,000, respectively.
As of Friday, Maisie and Smith have not paid those fines or made any payments on the $5.7 million they owe investors, the commission confirmed. Eshun did not appear before the commission and appears to have left the country for Dubai, according to emails sent to clients by Roger Blair and obtained by The Star.
It’s difficult to say for sure how many Windsorites invested money and never got it back.
A 2010 email from Roger Blair to the “Windsor leadership team” was sent to four people besides Bruce Blair and Laforet. Laforet said as a regional director, he had dozens of clients and salespeople working underneath him.
Laforet said he hasn’t heard from the other regional directors since his relations with Eshun and the Blairs started to sour. He said he came to the Star after months of meetings and phone calls with former clients who are furious and want to take action, but don’t want their financial woes aired in public, so he volunteered to attach his name and face to the story.
The programs promoted by Eshun, the Blairs and Laforet himself when he was a regional director promise everything from free “wealth grants” to relief on taxes in exchange for hefty monthly payments and large investments. Over the years, Laforet said he and his ex-wife forked over $11,700 with the promise of quadrupling their money through a Caribbean-based foundation, $5,700 for what they were told was a property investment in Turks and Caicos that would pay out one per cent in interest per month and $11,500 that accumulated in an account linked to a life insurance policy through the well-established insurance company Industrial Alliance.
The Laforets never got the money they invested back, let alone the promised interest and payouts, from the two Caribbean deals. They lost $8,650 from the life insurance-linked account – three quarters of the amount that had accumulated over the years – after agreeing to let DSC Lifestyles make a withdrawal to help the company weather the struggling market for six months under a promise to repay it with interest, Laforet said.
Fed up with the lack of answers and missing money, Laforet stopped promoting the deals and started sending demand letters and emails asking for his and other investors’ money back, along with tens of thousands in promised commission payments, in 2010.
The arrangement with Industrial Alliance seemed to be the most solid and bolstered the company’s legitimacy by its association with an established company. But it may also have helped Eshun and the Blairs get around a problem – a search through the Ontario Securities Commission website reveals none of them are registered to sell investments in Ontario.
Roger Blair, however, was registered to sell life insurance until Jan. 16, 2012, according to the Financial Services Commission of Ontario.
Bruce Blair sent his clients an email in February of 2012 informing them that Solutions 21 Financial – a company whose directors are Eshun and Roger Blair, according to Industry Canada’s online database – was no longer doing business with Industrial Alliance because it was “in the process of restructuring.” In fact, a spokesman for Industrial Alliance confirmed the company fired Solutions 21 Financial and reported it to the Financial Services Commission of Ontario in response to multiple customer complaints.
“Industrial Alliance suspended its MGA contract with Solutions 21 Financial on November 11, 2011 after receiving several complaints from clients. When Solutions 21 Financial failed to respond to the complaints, Industrial Alliance terminated the contract,” said spokesman Pierre Picard in an emailed statement.
Laforet still holds out hope he’ll get his money back from a speculative land deal in Whitby, the biggest investment he made, once the land is sold through power of sale. According to mortgage documents, the land was purchased for $8.5 million in October of 2008.
Bank statements show that Laforet moved $25,000 out of his pension money Ford gave him when he retired and an RRSP to invest in a mortgage on the agricultural land that investors were told would increase in value once Highway 407 was extended nearby. According to Laforet’s contract, he was supposed to receive quarterly interest payments totalling 10 per cent of his investment per year, with an additional five per cent per year payable at the end of a five-year term.
Pace Savings and Credit Union foreclosed on the mortgage on Oct. 19, according to a letter sent to Laforet by the bank’s lawyer. At about the same time, Solutions 21 stopped making promised interest payments to Laforet, with his bank statements showing no quarterly payments after April of 2012.
If and when the land is sold, the proceeds will go to pay the $3.5 million owed to Pace Savings first and investors like Laforet second, if there’s any money left over.
Most people probably think they’re too savvy to get involved in something like this – a group of unregistered personal finance consultants asking for your life savings, promising sky high returns and free money. Laforet said it worked in Windsor because the Blairs were a couple of local boys from Tilbury, who built relationships and convinced their clients to market the scheme to people close to them.
“Because of the way everything was promoted, you build up a trust,” Laforet said.
In fact, Bruce Blair is still promoting personal finance programs in Windsor through an organization called Value Concepts Consulting, although Bruce said it’s unaffiliated with Roger Blair, Jeff Eshun and their various companies and organizations.
Value Concepts Consulting stands out from the medical and accounting offices that share a mid-rise building at Ouellette Avenue and Ellis Street, just south of the downtown core. A gleaming, poster-sized etched glass and metallic plaque sports the company name and logo – three gears with hands like a clock emblazoned with dollar signs.
The Star visited his offices four times over the course of two weeks. The first three times when the Star visited during regular business hours, his office door was locked and the blinds were drawn.
The fourth time, just after 5 p.m. on a Thursday, he was there with a client.
Bruce said he couldn’t get into details about where everyone’s money is and why they haven’t received it because his brother Roger Blair was preparing a statement to send to The Star, but said he was confident the programs they promoted are legal and legitimate. The Star never received such a statement from Roger Blair.
Bruce said he, too, invested more than $100,000 through the various programs that he’s waiting to receive, just like everybody else. He wouldn’t confirm how many people in Windsor are in the same position, referring the question to Roger Blair again.
“I’m staying neutral. It’s got to be answered from the right source. I’m not the company,” he said. “I’m no different from Michael Laforet. I have funds that I’m on standby to wait to collect as well.”
Bruce said he wasn’t concerned about the fact he had invested his own money and encouraged others to do the same through a man with a record of selling illegal and misleading investments. He said there’s another side to the story in British Columbia – which he wouldn’t elaborate on – and suggested Maisie Smith may have been to blame.
Laforet’s fight to get his and his clients’ money back is going to be difficult because of the fractured way white collar crime enforcement works in Canada. Laforet said he and his former clients and associates have been exploring their options when it comes to filing a lawsuit or a police complaint, but came to The Star first, hoping that going public would help their case.
Following its investigation into Eshun and Smith, the British Columbia Securities Commission referred a portion of the file to the RCMP, who in turn passed it on to the OPP and the Peel Regional Police. RCMP spokesman Duncan Pound said the federal commercial crimes section of the agency decided its resources would be better put to use on other files.
“Unfortunately, we had higher priority matters that we had to assign our resources to,” he said. “We had higher fraud amounts with more victims with a greater likelihood of successful investigation leading to charges.”
The Peel Regional Police and OPP appear to have made the same decision. Spokesmen for the Peel Regional Police and OPP both said they are not actively investigating the matter, with Sgt. Joe Paolini of the Peel Regional Police saying he believes the force decided not to because the British Columbia Securities Commission was already involved.
Det. Glenn Gervais of the Windsor Police financial crimes branch said police in Windsor have not received any complaints related to the Blairs or the investment programs they promoted.
Both the British Columbia and Alberta securities commissions have issued cease-trade orders against the Whitby land deal, but Ontario, where the land and promoters are based, has not. Alison Ford, a spokeswoman for the Ontario Securities Commission, said the organization does not comment on complaints or open investigations.
Diane Urquhart, an independent financial analyst and advocate for stronger, more effective enforcement of white collar crime, said Laforet’s story is an example of what’s wrong with the system in Canada. She said it’s typical for police agencies and provincial securities commissions to consider the matter settled once one body launches an investigation and lays charges, like the British Columbia Securities Commission did in this case.
Police and local fraud squads “find excuses to not cover them, ranging from there’s no resources to there’s no crime, without doing any kind of in depth investigation,” Urquhart said. “We have a problem in the country. It’s a pretty serious and shocking problem.”
Laforet, a 51-year-old former Windsor resident and Ford pipe fitter who now works as a plumber in the greater Toronto area, invested his Ford pension, retirement savings and thousands of additional dollars into various programs and investment deals promoted by Bruce Blair, a former co-worker at Ford, and his brother Roger Blair, a life insurance salesman based in the Toronto area. Returns came in as promised at first and Laforet started working on commission marketing the program to friends, eventually being named a “regional director” of the personal finance company.
Are You Affected?
Did you invest money through DSC Lifestyle Services, Solutions 21 Financial or any of the other associated organizations mentioned in this article? The Windsor Star wants to hear from you. Contact reporter Claire Brownell at cbrownell@windsorstar.com or 519-255-6882.
Laforet has dreamed of retiring at 55 since he was a teenager. Four years away from that deadline, all of his retirement savings and his Ford pension are on the line, along with tens of thousands more in promised commission he had counted on to pay off debts before hanging up his hat.
But Laforet points out that at least he’s still working, unlike other Windsorites who lost money. One woman who contacted The Star and did not give permission to be identified said her elderly parents lost her father’s Chrysler buyout to investments promoted by the Blairs, with her father falling seriously ill soon after.
“We just recently found out that he’s developed stomach cancer and I think it’s from the stress. He’s one of your typical European men that just keeps everything bottled inside. This was their little nest egg,” the woman said. “The last time I went to speak with Mr. [Bruce] Blair, he wanted me to sign one of those confidentiality papers where you can’t go anywhere else. I lost it… I was like, are you kidding me? You want me to be all hush hush, because you don’t want anyone else to know, and you messed up my parents? I took the paper and I left in a huff after a couple of choice words.”
Laforet and other Windsor residents appear to have fallen victim to the same illegal investment deal that has cost Canadians across the country millions of dollars, according to a ruling from the British Columbia Securities Commission. Jeff Eshun, one of the principal promoters and a director of many of the affiliated companies and organizations, and his west coast associate Maisie Smith were recently found guilty of selling investments without a licence and ordered to repay $5.7 million along with fines totalling $1.25 million.
After several emails and phone calls to Bruce Blair over the course of two weeks were met with silence, The Star caught up with him at his Ouellette Avenue office. Bruce declined to answer specific questions about where the missing money is and why investors haven’t received it, but said he has total confidence that the programs he promoted are legal and legitimate.
“The void gets you wondering, frustrated, is it going to happen or not? That’s normal,” he said. “I’m not going to dramatize and create some negative aura… I don’t want to add to the pot or slow anything down.”
Bruce Blair of Value Concepts Consulting
Roger Blair and Eshun did not respond to multiple requests for comment sent over two weeks. Roger Blair sent an email on Jan. 25 asking for more details about Laforet’s allegations, but never replied after The Star provided the information.
Instead, Roger Blair and Eshun contacted Laforet through text messages and emails, urging him not to go public and claiming they were on the verge of turning things around – a story Laforet has heard before.
“We are not running away from the obligations to the base,” Eshun wrote in an email forwarded to The Star. “We are at the positive turning point in the drama and the good news is coming.”
But Laforet has waited long enough. And so have the people he convinced to invest their money as well.
“We have clients who didn’t have a mortgage – now they have a mortgage. Because they took the money out and it never got put back again. They’re retired now. It just kept snowballing and snowballing,” he said. “I’m angry. Somebody’s got to do something about this. This is just getting way out of hand.”
Promotional powerpoint presentations obtained by The Star that Laforet and other salespeople were given to market DSC Lifestyle Services in 2007 include a picture of Eshun and Roger Blair standing side by side, with the caption “The Founders.” Five years later, Eshun and his west coast associate Maisie Smith would admit to the British Columbia Securities Commission that they were selling investments without a licence, with the commission finding the two were dishonest to investors about where the money was going in a Jan. 9 decision.
The commission charged Eshun and Smith after the publication of a six-part series of articles by Vancouver Sun reporter David Baines. Baines wrote about a grocery cashier in Burnaby, B.C., whose story is very similar to Laforet’s – she moved her life savings into questionable investments promoted by Eshun and Roger Blair and became a regional director with DSC Lifestyles until the money suddenly stopped flowing.
The B.C. securities commission found that Eshun and Smith told 81 investors they would purchase “consumer secured notes” with their money through the company JV Raleigh, raising $5.7 million between July 2006 and January 2009. Instead, they funnelled it into companies that Eshun, Smith and Roger Blair are directors of, with Eshun also writing himself cheques totalling about $150,000.
The commission found that transfers totalling $1.5 million went from JV Raleigh to DSC Lifestyles Services, whose directors are Eshun and Blair.
“The respondents took $5.7 million from 81 investors on false pretences. There is no evidence that the investors have any hope of recovering any part of their investment. The respondents have shown no contrition,” the commission’s findings say.
The commission found Eshun and Smith guilty of securities violations, permanently banning them from selling investments. The commission also ordered them to repay $5.7 million collected from 81 investors and fined them $750,000 and $500,000, respectively.
As of Friday, Maisie and Smith have not paid those fines or made any payments on the $5.7 million they owe investors, the commission confirmed. Eshun did not appear before the commission and appears to have left the country for Dubai, according to emails sent to clients by Roger Blair and obtained by The Star.
It’s difficult to say for sure how many Windsorites invested money and never got it back.
A 2010 email from Roger Blair to the “Windsor leadership team” was sent to four people besides Bruce Blair and Laforet. Laforet said as a regional director, he had dozens of clients and salespeople working underneath him.
Laforet said he hasn’t heard from the other regional directors since his relations with Eshun and the Blairs started to sour. He said he came to the Star after months of meetings and phone calls with former clients who are furious and want to take action, but don’t want their financial woes aired in public, so he volunteered to attach his name and face to the story.
Bruce W. Blair of Value Concepts Consulting Inc. at his Ouellette Avenue office, Thursday January 31, 2013. (NICK BRANCACCIO/The Windsor Star).
The Laforets never got the money they invested back, let alone the promised interest and payouts, from the two Caribbean deals. They lost $8,650 from the life insurance-linked account – three quarters of the amount that had accumulated over the years – after agreeing to let DSC Lifestyles make a withdrawal to help the company weather the struggling market for six months under a promise to repay it with interest, Laforet said.
Fed up with the lack of answers and missing money, Laforet stopped promoting the deals and started sending demand letters and emails asking for his and other investors’ money back, along with tens of thousands in promised commission payments, in 2010.
The arrangement with Industrial Alliance seemed to be the most solid and bolstered the company’s legitimacy by its association with an established company. But it may also have helped Eshun and the Blairs get around a problem – a search through the Ontario Securities Commission website reveals none of them are registered to sell investments in Ontario.
Roger Blair, however, was registered to sell life insurance until Jan. 16, 2012, according to the Financial Services Commission of Ontario.
Bruce Blair sent his clients an email in February of 2012 informing them that Solutions 21 Financial – a company whose directors are Eshun and Roger Blair, according to Industry Canada’s online database – was no longer doing business with Industrial Alliance because it was “in the process of restructuring.” In fact, a spokesman for Industrial Alliance confirmed the company fired Solutions 21 Financial and reported it to the Financial Services Commission of Ontario in response to multiple customer complaints.
“Industrial Alliance suspended its MGA contract with Solutions 21 Financial on November 11, 2011 after receiving several complaints from clients. When Solutions 21 Financial failed to respond to the complaints, Industrial Alliance terminated the contract,” said spokesman Pierre Picard in an emailed statement.
Laforet still holds out hope he’ll get his money back from a speculative land deal in Whitby, the biggest investment he made, once the land is sold through power of sale. According to mortgage documents, the land was purchased for $8.5 million in October of 2008.
Bank statements show that Laforet moved $25,000 out of his pension money Ford gave him when he retired and an RRSP to invest in a mortgage on the agricultural land that investors were told would increase in value once Highway 407 was extended nearby. According to Laforet’s contract, he was supposed to receive quarterly interest payments totalling 10 per cent of his investment per year, with an additional five per cent per year payable at the end of a five-year term.
Pace Savings and Credit Union foreclosed on the mortgage on Oct. 19, according to a letter sent to Laforet by the bank’s lawyer. At about the same time, Solutions 21 stopped making promised interest payments to Laforet, with his bank statements showing no quarterly payments after April of 2012.
If and when the land is sold, the proceeds will go to pay the $3.5 million owed to Pace Savings first and investors like Laforet second, if there’s any money left over.
Most people probably think they’re too savvy to get involved in something like this – a group of unregistered personal finance consultants asking for your life savings, promising sky high returns and free money. Laforet said it worked in Windsor because the Blairs were a couple of local boys from Tilbury, who built relationships and convinced their clients to market the scheme to people close to them.
“Because of the way everything was promoted, you build up a trust,” Laforet said.
In fact, Bruce Blair is still promoting personal finance programs in Windsor through an organization called Value Concepts Consulting, although Bruce said it’s unaffiliated with Roger Blair, Jeff Eshun and their various companies and organizations.
Value Concepts Consulting stands out from the medical and accounting offices that share a mid-rise building at Ouellette Avenue and Ellis Street, just south of the downtown core. A gleaming, poster-sized etched glass and metallic plaque sports the company name and logo – three gears with hands like a clock emblazoned with dollar signs.
The Star visited his offices four times over the course of two weeks. The first three times when the Star visited during regular business hours, his office door was locked and the blinds were drawn.
The fourth time, just after 5 p.m. on a Thursday, he was there with a client.
Bruce said he couldn’t get into details about where everyone’s money is and why they haven’t received it because his brother Roger Blair was preparing a statement to send to The Star, but said he was confident the programs they promoted are legal and legitimate. The Star never received such a statement from Roger Blair.
Bruce said he, too, invested more than $100,000 through the various programs that he’s waiting to receive, just like everybody else. He wouldn’t confirm how many people in Windsor are in the same position, referring the question to Roger Blair again.
“I’m staying neutral. It’s got to be answered from the right source. I’m not the company,” he said. “I’m no different from Michael Laforet. I have funds that I’m on standby to wait to collect as well.”
Bruce said he wasn’t concerned about the fact he had invested his own money and encouraged others to do the same through a man with a record of selling illegal and misleading investments. He said there’s another side to the story in British Columbia – which he wouldn’t elaborate on – and suggested Maisie Smith may have been to blame.
Laforet’s fight to get his and his clients’ money back is going to be difficult because of the fractured way white collar crime enforcement works in Canada. Laforet said he and his former clients and associates have been exploring their options when it comes to filing a lawsuit or a police complaint, but came to The Star first, hoping that going public would help their case.
Following its investigation into Eshun and Smith, the British Columbia Securities Commission referred a portion of the file to the RCMP, who in turn passed it on to the OPP and the Peel Regional Police. RCMP spokesman Duncan Pound said the federal commercial crimes section of the agency decided its resources would be better put to use on other files.
“Unfortunately, we had higher priority matters that we had to assign our resources to,” he said. “We had higher fraud amounts with more victims with a greater likelihood of successful investigation leading to charges.”
The Peel Regional Police and OPP appear to have made the same decision. Spokesmen for the Peel Regional Police and OPP both said they are not actively investigating the matter, with Sgt. Joe Paolini of the Peel Regional Police saying he believes the force decided not to because the British Columbia Securities Commission was already involved.
Det. Glenn Gervais of the Windsor Police financial crimes branch said police in Windsor have not received any complaints related to the Blairs or the investment programs they promoted.
Both the British Columbia and Alberta securities commissions have issued cease-trade orders against the Whitby land deal, but Ontario, where the land and promoters are based, has not. Alison Ford, a spokeswoman for the Ontario Securities Commission, said the organization does not comment on complaints or open investigations.
Diane Urquhart, an independent financial analyst and advocate for stronger, more effective enforcement of white collar crime, said Laforet’s story is an example of what’s wrong with the system in Canada. She said it’s typical for police agencies and provincial securities commissions to consider the matter settled once one body launches an investigation and lays charges, like the British Columbia Securities Commission did in this case.
Police and local fraud squads “find excuses to not cover them, ranging from there’s no resources to there’s no crime, without doing any kind of in depth investigation,” Urquhart said. “We have a problem in the country. It’s a pretty serious and shocking problem.”