Lawyers at centre of $7M real estate embezzlement case charged with fraud

A lavish-living Toronto lawyer couple are facing criminal charges after more than $7 million in client money was embezzled from their firm’s trust accounts, much of it funnelled toward spending on luxury fashion and decor. 

Toronto police announced Thursday afternoon that Singa Bui, 42, who practised real estate law, has been charged with 42 counts including 24 of fraud over $5,000, 17 instances of criminal breach of trust and one count of possession of proceeds of crime over $5,000.

Her husband and law partner, Nicholas Cartel, 61, whose legal practice focused on litigation and class actions, was charged with one count of fraud over $5,000.

Neither Bui nor a lawyer representing her immediately responded to CBC’s emailed request for comment on Friday. 

Reached by phone, Cartel told CBC he will fight his charge vigorously, calling it baseless and “a ruse” to get him to provide evidence against his wife.

“There’s no evidence for my involvement whatsoever,” he said.

He said no one has told him what his fraud charge specifically relates to: who the alleged victim or victims are and what, exactly, he is alleged to have done wrong. 

“There’s no information whatsoever. Absolute zero.”

Home-sale money misappropriated

Nancy Marsilla said “it’s about time” that the charges were filed. A former client of the firm, Marsilla says she is out $220,000 that Bui and Cartel’s law firm had been holding onto after the sale of her home in 2021 while she settled her divorce.

“It is devastating to know that someone in such a position of power and responsibility allegedly chose to manipulate and defraud the very clients they were hired to protect,” she told CBC on Friday. “There must be stronger safeguards in place to protect people navigating major legal and financial transactions.” 

The couple ran a boutique firm called Cartel & Bui LLP out of a smartly decorated office in Toronto’s west end, until a number of real estate clients began complaining that money was going missing during home sales and purchases. 

Starting in September 2023, in a half-dozen southern Ontario home sales the firm handled, Cartel & Bui didn’t pay off the sellers’ mortgages as it was supposed to, according to records filed in civil lawsuits. Instead, it took the buyers’ money and paid out the home equity to its client sellers, but held on to the rest, the records show.

In perhaps the worst alleged embezzlement, some homebuyers who had agreed to acquire a house in Toronto forwarded more than $2 million to Cartel & Bui LLP in November toward the purchase. But within days, most of the funds disappeared from the firm’s trust account. The deal never closed and the homebuyers have not recovered their money.

Cartel, Bui and their firm are facing more than 15 lawsuits. In the course of those proceedings, Bui admitted in a sworn statement in November that she started pilfering client money from the firm’s trust account as far back as 2014. 

She said she initially took smaller amounts “to make ends meet” but eventually embezzled tens of thousands of dollars at a time to fund “luxurious vacations,” fine dining, private-school tuition for their children and “elegant furnishings and expensive art.” 

Because her statement was compelled by a judge’s order, it can’t be used against her to support a criminal prosecution.

In multiple interviews with CBC News and his court filings, Cartel has always strongly denied having any hand in the theft of client funds, and has repeatedly blamed his wife, who he says managed both their firm’s and their household’s finances. Neither Bui nor her lawyers have replied to CBC’s multiple requests for comment over the last year.

Police raided their midtown Toronto home in December and seized more than 1,000 items of high fashion and furniture, including designer dresses, footwear, suits, hats, ties and artwork.

Both lawyers were also provisionally suspended from practising law in April of last year, while the Law Society of Ontario investigates. 

The Law Society has since brought disciplinary charges against Bui but not Cartel. 

The pair have already served a few weeks in jail, after they were both found in contempt of court last fall in the civil proceedings against them. 

No details on criminal allegations

The police announcement on Thursday about the criminal charges against Bui and Cartel does not specify who the alleged victims are or any other details about the alleged criminal acts.

But in a court application to get a warrant to search the couple’s home in December, investigators said 20 people contacted them between December 2023 and May 2024 to make criminal complaints regarding Cartel & Bui LLP. That same document names more than 40 people plus banks and insurance companies as potential “victims.”

“Evidence uncovered to date substantiates the belief that the lawyers at Cartel & Bui LLP had been for years functionally using the firm’s real estate trust account as a personal/business line-of-credit — unlawfully drawing on the trust account to fund a series of personal and business expenses with little-to-no-apparent-regard as to how those funds would be repaid,” the police application says.