A Vancouver investment advisor is suing a longtime accountant and the accountant’s real estate developer brother — who was banned from trading in Canada years ago — after an investment in an Arizona land deal disappeared.

Neil Pope is seeking the return of his investment funds as well as damages in a lawsuit filed in British Columbia Supreme Court against Richmond accountant Peter Stojak and his brother Patrick Stojak for an undisclosed sum as part of an investment deal that involved the diversion of $8 million from the US deal to unnamed interests. foreign investment agreements.

It was 2010, shortly after the collapse of the subprime mortgage bubble in the United States and a severe global economic crisis, when Peter Stojak approached Pope with the promise of investing in his company. brother through which he would buy, repair and sell residential properties in Arizona. and other states, as claimed.

Peter Stojak assured Pope that Patrick was a “successful and trustworthy businessman” with experience handling real estate transactions for others, including in Arizona.

What Pope was not informed of was that in 2004, Patrick Stojak sold securities on behalf of entities incorporated in the Bahamas and operating in British Columbia and Arizona to British Columbians without a prospectus and in making “false and misleading” statements, the complaint states. He had promised an annual return of 2,500 percent.

Investors lost money, and in 2004 the British Columbia Securities Commission banned him from trading securities in British Columbia for three years and fined him $5,000.

Three years after the ban ended, Peter Stojak told Pope that Patrick Stojak would personally manage the investments, that Peter Stojak would handle the accounting, that Pope would be kept informed of the investments and that he could withdraw his profits if he wanted it and that it would be paid when the properties were sold, according to the claim.

The Stojaks had also shown Pope the accounting of how net sales proceeds were reinvested in his investments, leading him to believe they were properly managed and to increase his investments from time to time, according to the release.

They told him they were using the proceeds to buy more properties to make more profit, and Pope agreed to that, according to the statement.

By late 2023, Pope was concerned that his U.S. investments were being used for something else without his knowledge or consent, that expenses were inflated, and that the Stojaks were running the company negligently.

He repeatedly asked them for an accounting of transactions, proceeds, expenditures, and where the money went, and their answers were at first incomplete and blatantly false, and when finally provided, they were ” deficient, false and misleading,” according to the lawsuit.

When confronted with his suspicions that the investment money had been used for something other than buying American homes to resell, Peter Stojak said that since 2018, US$5.8 million had been been withdrawn from the investment and sent abroad, according to the statement.

The brothers responded with “fluid, contradictory and confusing” information and Pope suspected that explanations that they had loaned money to other companies, made offshore deposits and potentially had the money seized by foreign governments were “patently false”.

Since October 2023, the Stojaks told Pope he would get his money back, but the promised dates came and went, according to the lawsuit. Financial statements from December 2023 indicated that the money was loaned to a company that Patrick Stojak half-owned, according to the lawsuit. Only the Stojaks know what happened to the money and they acted in bad faith, negligently and in violation of their duties to the pope, according to the lawsuit.

Pope suffered damages and loss of reasonable expectation of profit from his investments, and the brothers used the investment offer as a “sham to perpetrate wrongful conduct for their own benefit,” according to the lawsuit.

A message left with Pope’s attorney was not immediately returned. Peter Stojak’s phone number listed with his former accounting firm was out of service, and a firm linked to his name said he no longer worked there. A message left on a social media account for Patrick Stojak was not returned.