January 24-2014
. . . mystery
An Iranian-Canadian disappeared last year with more than $3 million. His family says he is dead. But that is being disputed in Canada.
More than a month after a funeral was held for Javad Heydary, the question of whether the lawyer is dead or alive remains very much alive.
A report by the Law Society of Upper Canada, presented Monday in the Ontario Superior Court, offers a glimpse into how more than $3 million belonging to a Palestinian couple living in Toronto was siphoned out of a bank account controlled by Heydary.
But the report doesn’t nail down whether Heydary is really dead as claimed. The law society’s manager of trustee services told the court the body repatriated from Iran in December and reported as Heydary’s “was difficult to identify with 100 percent certainty.”
Margaret Cowtan said three “relatively independent individuals” identified the remains, and provided affidavits to the law society following the funeral service and burial in Richmond Hill, a Toronto suburb with many Iranian expatriate residents.
“All indicated to some degree or another that the body belonged to [Heydary],” she told the court. However, Cowtan said they could not be certain “because the body had not been embalmed in a manner consistent with North America.” She did not name the three who viewed the body.
Heydary was 49 when he left for a visit in Iran last November, after the money went missing. Within days, his wife in Tehran said he had died in Tehran.
A source earlier told the Toronto Star Heydary’s wife visited his downtown Toronto offices November 21 and informed his associates that her husband was dead. However, the program distributed at his Toronto funeral in December listed his date of death as November 24.
Lawyer Mark Adilman, who is representing the Palestinian couple, Hasan and Samira Abuzour, said he is not yet satisfied that Heydary is dead.
“Right now, I don’t have enough information to say,” he told the Star in an interview.
When asked why more scientific means were not used to identify the body, Cowtan told the Star the law society “does not have the power to declare people dead or alive or obtain DNA evidence.”
Cowtan told the court that a lawyer for the Heydary family arranged for the body to be identified.
The Abuzours have been fighting for months to retrieve a $3.6-million settlement that was supposedly being held in trust by Heydary’s law firm.
According to the law society’s report to the court, beginning in July 2012, more than $2.7 million was transferred from the trust account to the firm’s general account to cover operating expenses. And the report indicated that some funds from that account ended up in Heydary’s personal account.
Revenue generated by Heydary’s law business was “nowhere near sufficient” to pay for operating expenses, which averaged $500,000 per month in 2013, the report said.
By the time the law society seized control of Heydary’s practice in late November, the trust account contained less than $320,000. It should have been holding more than $3.7 million for 62 clients, the report said.