Rockland lawyer facing criminal charges after years-long OPP investigation
A Rockland lawyer who was disbarred last year after more than $3 million disappeared from trust funds in 2016 is facing a number of criminal charges, Ontario Provincial Police said in a news release issued Tuesday.
Stéphane Langlois, 51, is charged with 15 counts each of criminal breach of trust, misappropriation of funds, fraudulent theft and theft by person required to account.
He is also charged with 12 counts of fraud over $5,000, eight counts of uttering a forged document and seven counts of fraud under $5,000.
Ontario Provincial Police have been investigating Langlois since August 2016, after associates in Charron Langlois LLP in Rockland made formal complaints to the law society against their colleagues.
Langlois is scheduled to appear in the provincial court on Sept. 8.
Disbarred last year
Langlois was disbarred last March at a tribunal of the Law Society of Ontario (LSO).
He was found to have misappropriated more than $3.2 million from the law firm trust account between January 2015 and August 2016. He also inappropriately took more than $35,000 while acting as an estate trustee between November 2011 and May 2013, the tribunal determined.
He was ordered to repay the LSO’s compensation fund more than $2.1 million — the amount the society paid in compensation to 11 claimants who qualified.
He was also ordered to pay $32,000 in costs to the LSO over five years, beginning a year after the order.
The society supended Langlois’s license Sept.1, 2016, after an initial investigation.
Langlois told an LSO investigator he spent about $1 million of the money to pay the law firm’s bills and for personal use, according to the LSO report.
In his affidavit, law society investigator Prospero Vito said he was told by employees at Langlois’s firm that he gambled, lived and “extravagant” lifestyle and