14_February 5, 2010 Fifth Estate Expose: Earl Jones and the Royal Bank of Canada - The True Story

Video Excerpt from Fifth Estate broadcast, Feb. 5, 2010

Earl Jones lived the life of luxury until July 2009 when he was declared bankrupt and arrested for operating a massive Ponzi scheme through the Royal Bank of Canada Beaconsfield Branch.

After the fraud was exposed, his former clients obtained copies of their cheques to assist in the investigation. They discovered that Jones and/or his office staff had forged their signatures and cashed the cheques at the Beaconsfield Branch. This is called a forged double endorsement. Jones went to jail for eleven years for this crime.

One would assume, if a victim of a forged double endorsement produced the cheque as evidence to the Royal Bank, their money would be reimbursed. NOT SO.... the Royal Bank rejected every claim, essentially blaming the victims for the Bank's negligence.

With no where and no one to turn to, the victims asked for the assistance of Stein & Stein lawyers. Neil Stein joined forces with Robert Kugler and a Class Action vs. the Royal Bank was launched on February 5, 2010.

That night, Fifth Estate's Hana Gartner, the respected Canadian Broadcast Corporation investigative reporter, aired their report on the fraud, "Earl Jones: In Trust".

Near the end of the program, Hana Gartner asks Wayne Bossert, Royal Bank Executive Vice President, if there were any alarm bells that went off before 2008. Bossert replied, "We saw no signals that there was any abuse, any suspicious transactions through the account."

Gartner then produced a Royal Bank internal memo from 2001 entered as evidence in the Class Action earlier that day. The memo states the Royal Bank knew Jones was operating his personal account contrary to bank regulations and that "he could get himself in trouble."

This was a shocking reveal on-camera that embarrassed the Royal Bank, exposing their hypocrisy and negligence to address the matter.

In fact, the Royal Bank actually provided the 2001 memo to the victims' lawyers but failed to review the document or consider the matter sufficiently important.

Since this fraud was first discovered in 2009, the Royal Bank has continued to mismanage the entire affair, often discretely blaming the victims. Their lawyers have gone so far as to question the age of the victims (70% seniors) in a shameful attempt to distort the facts.

Category:

News & Politics

Tags:

• Earl
• Jones
• victims
• Montreal
• fraud
• Royal
• Bank
• Canada
• class
• action
• Ponzi
• fifth
• estate
• RBC
• Beaconsfield