Toronto lawyer who stole client money for vacations, handbags and shoes is jailed for contempt

Zach Dubinsky · CBC News

· Posted: Nov 23, 2024 4:00 AM EST | Last Updated: 8 hours ago

A disgraced real-estate lawyer who this week admitted to pilfering millions in client money to support her and her family’s lavish lifestyle was handcuffed in a Toronto courtroom Friday afternoon and marched out by a constable to serve a 20-day sentence for contempt of court, as her husband and mother watched.

Singa Bui “consistently ignored orders of the court and complied only when faced with a warrant for her arrest or a threat of incarceration,” Ontario Superior Court Justice William Chalmers said in sending her off to jail.

He also ordered that two days after Bui gets out next month, her husband and former law partner, Nicholas Cartel, must go back in to serve 10 days remaining on his own contempt sentence, after a bizarre twist in which he was wrongly released early.

It’s the latest chapter in the saga of the high-living lawyer couple whose now-defunct firm, Cartel & Bui LLP, embezzled nearly $7 million from home-buyers and sellers in southern Ontario before the scheme came crashing to a halt last year.

At least 26 plaintiffs are pursuing Cartel, Bui and their firm in court. Many have already obtained judgments totalling millions of dollars, and orders for Bui and Cartel to hand over documents and answer questions about where the money went. But they would then find themselves up against what the judge has described as repeated failures by Bui and Cartel to comply over the last 10 months, which triggered the contempt findings.

Bui’s licence to practise law in Ontario, along with Cartel’s, has been suspended pending further investigation. He has repeatedly claimed he had no knowledge of any misappropriation, which the judge has said many times he finds implausible. Police are also investigating and have not decided whether to lay criminal charges, which could lead to years in prison.

The case has exposed frailties both in the self-regulation of lawyers’ trust accounts by the Law Society of Ontario, and also in the home-buying process in the province, which critics say is vulnerable to financial manipulation by unscrupulous attorneys.

Cartel and Bui “breached their fiduciary duty, and as lawyers, those are the people that we’re supposed to trust,” said plaintiff Nancy Marsilla of Richmond Hill, Ont., who is out $220,000 that the firm had been holding on to after the sale of her former home in 2021 while she settled her divorce.

Marsilla attended court Friday to serve legal documents on Bui before she was taken away to jail.

“It’s really disturbing that lawyers can get away with that. And it took so long — since 2014, I can’t believe it,” she said. 

‘Well beyond our means’

Marsilla was referring to revelations at a hearing earlier this week and in a last-minute sworn statement from Bui in which the lawyer now admits she started stealing from her firm’s trust account — a tightly regulated lawyer bank account that only holds money belonging to clients and not the firm — as early as 2014.

In her statement, Bui says she initially poached client funds for “small things” like when she and Cartel were behind on a bill payment, but ramped up over the years to pilfering tens of thousands of dollars at a time for luxury purchases like Prada handbags and Christian Louboutin shoes.

Even the jail doesn’t follow my orders. What can I say?– Ontario Superior Court Justice William Chalmers

She also said she took “an amount that I cannot quantify at this time” to fund “unprofitable” business ventures by her and her husband.

Bui’s description reads like a Ponzi scheme: “I would then try to replace that money with funds received from subsequent real estate transactions. Over time, it became increasingly difficult to keep up with the repayments, and I was in more and more debt, requiring a constant flow of new client funds to pay off the debt.”

Her affidavit includes photos and credit card statements showing purchases like $12,175 at Christian Dior Couture, $19,585 on a stay at the Rosewood London hotel and $119,000 on two framed photographs by Rodney Smith for the law firm’s office.

“My husband and I lived well beyond our means,” she said. “Our children went to private school at a cost of approximately $100,000 a year and we had two nannies at a cost of approximately $95,000 a year… We also adopted a luxury lifestyle, which we could not afford.”

‘I was getting so angry reading this’

Another plaintiff, Thierry Cohen-Scali, who has a $470,000 judgment against Cartel, Bui and their firm, says he couldn’t finish reading Bui’s affidavit.

“I had to put it down in the middle because I was getting so angry,” he said Friday. “It was her telling us she lived the big life on our money for 10 years, and then is trying to pass herself off as a victim.” Bui has suggested to the court that her actions were driven in part by both mental health problems and by Cartel’s need for funds for various business schemes.

Cohen-Scali said that, perhaps counter-intuitively, the silver lining is that Bui’s statement makes clear that the stolen money is mostly gone. That, he said, means victims won’t need to spend much more time or money chasing down the couple’s assets and can instead start pressing for compensation from a special Law Society of Ontario fund that can help victims of fraud by lawyers.

The law society’s compensation fund requires, though, that victims try to recover their losses from a lawyer directly — for example, by suing them — before filing a claim, which Cohen-Scali criticized as “double-victimizing.”

“First, somebody steals my money. Then the law society system tells me, ‘You have to go chase that money.’ But everybody knows the money is gone. I’ve spent $60,000 in lawyer fees. It’s throwing good money after bad,” he said. 

Even then, the law society’s decisions on compensation are discretionary and unappealable, he noted, and payouts are capped at $500,000.

Cartel freed early

Another odd twist was the announcement by Bui’s lawyer, in a hearing on Monday, that Cartel had been released from jail early on his 30-day contempt sentence, handed down on Oct. 25.

Apparently, he was granted the standard early release of a criminal sentence after serving two-thirds — even though the judge had explicitly ordered he serve his full time.

“I’m shocked,” Chalmers lamented in court on Monday before issuing an arrest warrant for Cartel. “Even the jail doesn’t follow my orders. What can I say?”

At Friday’s hearing, Cartel sat apart from his wife and her mother in the gallery. Bui was marched past him on her way to jail. The court then ordered him to surrender himself to the Toronto South Detention Centre on Dec. 14 to serve the remaining 10 days on his sentence, meaning he will get out just in time for Christmas.