Disbarred Kamloops lawyer’s lawsuit dismissed over delays

A disbarred Kamloops lawyer threatened to take legal action against former friends and business partners over company shares. Five years later, a BC judge tossed the lawsuit.

Nickolaus Weiser told his friend to issue the shares in 2020 because he had the opportunity to earn $1.8 million in profit, then threatened legal action if the couple he had known for decades didn’t comply, according to a recent court decision.

“If this opportunity is fraudulently taken away from the Weiser family, there will be an action against you seeking damages in that amount,” he said in a 2020 email to them. “The risk of you two losing all your assets, including your house, in a lawsuit for damages based on fraud can all be avoided, (and wouldn’t it be easy and less costly) to simply transfer the USD shares to me.”

Though he followed through with the lawsuit, a judge never got the chance to hear Weiser’s argument because the former lawyer failed to deliver any meaningful evidence or effort to move the lawsuit forward.

BC Supreme Court Justice Lindsay Lyster said the reason for the delay falls “squarely at his feet,” even after the defendants pushed him several times to move it along, according to a March 14 decision.

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Anything other than tossing the claim altogether wasn’t an option for her, both in the interest of the elderly defendants and the justice system at large.

“I conclude that this is a case in which permitting the action to proceed in the face of inordinate and inexcusable delay on Mr. Weiser’s part would undermine public confidence in the justice system,” Lyster said in her decision.

It’s the latest in a series of losses for Weiser, a Kamloops lawyer of 30 years who was disbarred last year after numerous actions against him by the BC Law Society.

The lawsuit was related to a company owned by Leslee and Lawrence Marsh, who were named as defendants in the case. Weiser claimed he had shares in their company, Integrita Consulting and Developments Inc., which they held in trust for him.

They denied holding shares in trust for Weiser and filed a countersuit, claiming Weiser hasn’t repaid a loan. Weiser did admit to agreeing to a repayment, but said that payment was “not to be demanded.”

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The loans from Integrita were also the subject of one of the Law Society’s investigations into Weiser, prompted by a complaint from the Marshes.

He wrote the loan agreement, acting as lawyer for himself and the company, and the conflict of interest landed him in hot water with the regulator.

Over the past few years, Weiser has faced accusations from the Law Society that include using a trust fund to hide money from an unlicensed cannabis company and practicing while already suspended.

He was deemed “ungovernable” by the regulator last spring and he was disbarred. By November, it came to another finding of professional misconduct because he showed an ongoing pattern of ignoring Law Society sanctions.