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A Toronto real estate lawyer who admitted to embezzling from homebuyers and sellers in southern Ontario going back as much as a decade was disbarred Friday afternoon in a law society hearing.
Singa Bui's licence to practise law was revoked following a three-hour-long hearing in which the Law Society of Ontario presented more than 2,000 pages of evidence, which she did not contest, that Bui repeatedly dipped into her firm's trust account to steal millions of dollars of client money and even forged bank records in a way that hid the theft.
Bui has previously admitted she spent the money on decorating her family's two homes, luxury clothing and jewelry, private school tuition for her children, and vacations, among other things.
She was "found to have committed the most serious financial misconduct a lawyer could be engaged in, and breached her core obligations to act with honour and integrity," law society lawyer Chad Skinner told the hearing.
"She has committed misappropriation against 13 separate clients, to the staggering amount of over $12 million. These funds have been used to fund a lavish lifestyle for Ms. Bui and her family, including purchasing luxury goods and travel."
Bui did not attend the virtual hearing. Her lawyer Nadia Liva offered no evidence in rebuttal and didn't contest any of the law society's submissions, except to ask for a reduced costs order against Bui of $50,000.
Fifty-eight pairs of Manolo Blahnik shoes were among the hundreds of luxury items seized from the home of Bui and husband Nicholas Cartel by Toronto police last year amid a fraud investigation into the lawyer couple. (Ontario Superior Court filing)The three-person panel hearing the case only spent about 10 minutes deliberating before deciding to revoke Bui's licence and order her to pay the $100,000 in costs. It also ordered her to reimburse amounts the Law Society of Ontario is paying out from its compensation fund to some of her victims, which currently adds up to $736,000, but with an additional $500,000-plus still pending.
More than $6 million has not been returned of the $12 million. A little more than half of that has been paid out by insurance companies to some of Bui's victims.
Much of the evidence at Friday's hearing was already known through earlier disciplinary hearings and court records from more than 20 lawsuits filed against Bui and her husband and law partner, Nicholas Cartel, who together had a now-defunct firm called Cartel & Bui LLP in Toronto's Liberty Village neighbourhood.
But for the first time, the public heard evidence that Bui falsified bank statements in a way that helped cover her tracks.
In August 2022, the Law Society of Ontario dispatched an auditor to do a routine financial spot check on Cartel & Bui LLP. The auditor asked Bui to provide a number of financial records, including bank statements for all the firm's trust accounts for June 2022 and the ledger of client trust account balances.
A trust account is a tightly regulated bank account that only holds money belonging to a lawyer's clients and not the firm.
At that point, by her own later admission, Bui had been poaching from her firm's trust account for years.
But the bank statements that Bui handed over had more than 50 transactions deleted, totalling more than $350,000 in withdrawals, according to the law society's evidence presented Friday.
The deleted transactions included payments to personal credit cards and a daycare centre.
"The provided records had been edited to remove transactions that may have alerted the law society to the misuse of the firm's trust accounts," Skinner said at the hearing.
In the end, the auditor appears to have raised no red flags, because filings in court and at the law society show that the embezzlement continued until the end of the following year. Only in April 2023 did someone complain to the law society about possible misappropriation of money.
Separately, Toronto police have laid 42 criminal charges against Bui, including fraud over $5,000, criminal breach of trust and possession of the proceeds of crime.
Her husband, Cartel, who mostly practised in class actions and litigation, is facing one criminal charge of fraud over $5,000. The law society has also brought disciplinary charges against him but a hearing date hasn't been set.