Two men to be extradited to U.S. on fraud charges
Pull-patch Hells Angel and his associate accused in alleged pump-and-dump scam
A B.C. Supreme Court judge has ordered two B.C. men — one of whom is a full-patch Hells Angel — committed to the U.S. to face securities and wire fraud charges in New York state.
Justice Catherine Wedge issued the oral ruling on Tuesday against Hells Angel Courtney Vasseur and co-accused Curtis Lehner, a former stockbroker.
A committal order is the first stage in the extradition process.
Department of Justice spokesman Ian McLeod confirmed the order was made, as did Lehner's lawyer Teresa Mitchell-Banks. Vasseur and Lehner are among several people charged in 2022 in New York with making US$35 million by orchestrating “multiple pump-and-dump stock manipulation schemes” over several years.
Vasseur's lawyer Paul McMurray filed an appeal immediately after Wedge's ruling.
The Court of Appeal registry would not release details of the grounds of appeal.
The New York indictment says Vasseur worked with the others to “secretly amass control of the vast majority of the stock of certain publicly traded companies.”
The accused “then manipulated the price and trading volumes for these stocks, causing the share price and trading volume to become artificially inflated, and finally sold out of their secretly amassed positions at these inflated values at the expense of the investing public.”
At a hearing last fall, McMurray said that the supposed evidence shows “a lot of unsupported allegations made by people of dubious character — fraudsters.”
“At the end of the day, what we're going to ask you to find is that the record of the case is a house of cards that collapses under its own weight,” McMurray said.
“It does not create a body of evidence ... that would justify the committal of either Mr. Lehner or Mr. Vasseur for extradition.”
Mitchell-Banks argued that the record of the case has specifics about the alleged role of another co-accused named Hasan Sario, but very little of that implicates Lehner or Vasseur in the wrongdoing.
Summaries of the evidence from several unsavoury confidential witnesses in the case cannot be relied upon, both lawyers said.