Bennett Jones
Munaf Mohamed comments in Lexpert's Special Edition on Litigation on the impact of fraud on business during the pandemic. He says, “the incidence of fraud seems to increase because people will sometimes turn to desperate measures to address the financial stress, whether it’s individual or corporate.”
On managing corporate risk, Munaf says that over the past six months, he has seen a heightened interest in corporations looking more closely at their affairs and conducting investigations, in part because regulators are being more vigilant about fraud and the like.
Munaf's comments also include:
"Mohamed sees Canada as having a poor record of successfully prosecuting financial crime, such as money laundering and kiting and the U.S. as being more active in enforcements. As well, Canada’s civil system is better equipped, with its extraordinary remedies, to regain money than is the criminal system, he says. Getting worldwide freezing orders and third-party disclosure orders, 'assuming you can establish the proper foundation of evidence, allows you to establish an investigation of a private party rather than leaving it in the hands of the criminal system or authorities...'"
"If you are a large company with resources, you can use the civil system to pursue fraudulent claims and repatriate money and seek the extraordinary orders you can get here and in other jurisdictions. The case is different if you are an individual with limited means; you’re not going to have that ability, and you probably are going to have to go through the criminal justice system. And I guess the question is whether the criminal justice system has the resources to pursue what I’ll call extra-jurisdictional fraud claims."