Ammon News - AMMONNEWS - A Jordanian man who moved to Bedford with his family after allegedly embezzling $15 million from a chemical company based in the United Arab Emirates appears to have fled Canada, owing his lawyers in Ontario and Nova Scotia $750,000.

Obegi Chemicals LLC went after its former senior executive, Ghassan Hilmi [..], his wife, Maha Mohammad [..], and their son, Zeid Ghassan[..], first in Ontario and then here in an effort to recoup the company’s losses.

Despite a Nova Scotia Supreme Court order to surrender their passports made at the end of 2010, the court heard Thursday that the family appears to have moved back to Jordan.

"I am now satisfied that the family have vacated the jurisdiction of Canada," Justice Deborah Smith said Thursday in her Halifax courtroom.

Michelle Awad, a local lawyer working for Obegi, told the court "we now have pretty definite proof that the family have left Canada and are in Jordan."

A May 20 email from Ghassan to his friend, is part of the court file.

"We have taken the decision to leave and go back home,"Ghassan typed on his BlackBerry from Jordan. "It all came quickly and we decided that this Canada project thing will not work for us. We have invested 18 months into this and are now asked to invest another 36 months (before) we can get the passports. It does not work for us. Work and personal pressures meant that we had to choose and leave all."

Complicating their departure is a massive unpaid legal bill the family racked up since Obegi started looking for Ghassan in Ontario late last year when the company discovered that he had an Ontario driver’s licence and a bank account in Mississauga, and that the family has health cards from that province.

The hunt for the missing millions turned to Nova Scotia two days before Christmas 2010 when Obegi discovered the family own a new $500,000 home at 485 Southgate Dr.

The family’s lawyers in Ontario and Nova Scotia are owed about $750,000, according to documents filed in Ontario’s Superior Court of Justice.

Smith granted an order Thursday allowing lawyers from the Halifax firm of Blois, Nickerson & Bryson LLP, who had represented the family here, to be removed as their solicitor of record.

At the same time, the judge granted an order freezing the family’s assets here indefinitely.

Smith also ordered the family to pay a little more than $8,000 toward Obegi’s legal bill in this province.

Court documents Ghassan had Swiss bank accounts and was making plans to change his family’s identity.

Justice Lynn Ratushny of the Ontario Superior Court of Justice ordered earlier this month that Ghassan and his wife are "in criminal contempt." She directed Canadian police officers to detain him for a year, and his wife for six months.

The family also has a son, 20, and a daughter, 16, who were attending school here. Those children are not part of the legal battle.

Ghassan worked for Obegi until 2009. He moved to Nova Scotia in September of that year and his family joined him that December.

The Canada Border Services Agency searched the family’s Bedford home in January.

Agents found five passport applications for St. Kitts and Nevis for the family.

Ghassan told investigators that he made inquiries in November 2010 about obtaining citizenship from St. Kitts and Nevis. Court documents indicate the family had a plan to change their names and identities, obtain St. Kitts and Nevis passports and then continue to live in Canada.

The Southgate Drive home is the only Ghassan asset Obegi’s lawyers have found in Nova Scotia, Awad said, noting that "there’s not much equity" in the house the family bought last year with a $400,000 mortgage.



* thechronicleherald.ca/Business