Montreal man ordered to pay $1M for falsely claiming his ex-friend had Nazi gold

MONTREAL — A Quebec Superior Court has ordered a Montreal millionaire to pay his former business partner nearly $1 million for falsely accusing him and his wife of profiting off gold stolen by Nazis from Jews in concentration camps.

The ruling recounts how Glenn Feldman began making the claims after a falling out in 2019 with his longtime friend Irwin Lande, who had recently refused to lend him money.

Feldman is a real estate developer and lawyer.

The ruling explains how Feldman falsely accused Lande of paying for renovations of his Montreal home with millions of dollars of gold bars his family had supposedly stolen from victims of the Holocaust.

Feldman also falsely suggested Lande’s cousin Dr. Ludwig Delphiner was a Nazi SS officer and was to blame for the theft, despite him immigrating to Canada in 1926, before Second World War, the ruling said.

Thomas Davis, the Quebec Superior Court judge, didn’t find Feldman’s claims to be credible.

“Feldman chose to believe only what he wanted to believe,” Davis wrote in his judgment rendered on June 16. “To make such damaging allegations founded on a very incomplete investigation is not the conduct of a reasonable person and is, in and of itself, a fault.”

The judge has since ordered him to pay $985,000 in moral and punitive damages to Lande and his wife, plus legal costs. He also granted a permanent injunction against Feldman, demanding he stop spreading false allegations about the two.

The Canadian Press was unable to reach Feldman or Lande for comment.

This is the second time Feldman was ordered to pay damages to the Lande family for making disparaging statements about them. In a separate ruling from February 2024, Davis ordered him to pay over $400,000 in damages to two of Lande’s nephews.

Quebec’s bar association also suspended Feldman for seven days in 2022, for posting a video in December 2020 challenging Lande to a “bare-knuckle boxing match in Las Vegas” to decide who should keep the gold bars. A disciplinary committee concluded Feldman had contravened his professional obligations as a lawyer, when he posted the video and for claiming he was on a mission to uncover the source of his former business partner’s wealth.

In the latest ruling from June 2025, Davis wrote that several elements Feldman relied upon to support his allegations appear to be imagined.

Feldman falsely accused his former business partner and his wife Claude-Andrée Pion of hiding the gold in two exterior storage tunnels and an interior depot located in their Montreal home, for instance, according to the ruling. He also incorrectly stated that on Dec. 11, 2019, three safes used to store the gold had been “dropped into the Landes’ home by crane at 2 a.m.,” the ruling said.

An architect involved in the home renovation however told the court that he never saw any evidence, during visits to the home or in the plans, indicating the couple had a hidden bunker.

The judge also questioned how Lande could have managed to profit off the gold while simultaneously keeping it hidden.

Davis concluded the allegations were devastating for the couple, who like Feldman were also Jewish.

“Before Mr. Feldman began to disseminate his story, the Landes had a busy social calendar, with at least weekly invitations, mostly in the Jewish community,” wrote the judge, adding those invitations “largely disappeared” after he began spreading rumours about the family.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Oct, 28, 2025.