Law dean and firm partner join advisory group on securities and capital market investigations

Mary Condon, dean of Osgoode Hall Law School, and Lawrence Ritchie, Toronto-based partner at Osler, Hoskin & Harcourt LLP, have joined a new special advisory group at the Toronto Integrated Market Enforcement Team (IMET) of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, O Division.

This is a newly announced pilot project that will last for one year, said the RCMP’s news release. The advisory group’s members are chosen based on their background in securities law, forensic accounting, capital market regulation and law enforcement.

They will offer real-time advice on issues arising in certain Toronto IMET investigations in the areas of securities law, process and regulation; financial services; regulatory requirements; forensic accounting; corporate investigations; security risk management; and capital market criminal investigations.

Condon teaches securities regulation and advanced securities for Osgoode’s JD program and LLM in securities law program. She has extensively written about securities regulation and pensions policy and has delivered lectures on these subjects in Canada and abroad. At the Ontario Securities Commission, she has been commissioner, board member and full-time vice-chairperson for a three-year period.

Ritchie is chairperson of Osler’s cross-disciplinary risk management and crisis response national practice group and a key contact for its securities regulatory enforcement and broker-dealer practice group. As a securities litigation lawyer, he has appeared before various administrative tribunals and all levels of Canadian courts and has acted for different clients involved in high-profile investigations.

Ritchie has served as a full-time vice-chairperson of the Ontario Securities Commission for seven years, as executive vice-president and senior policy advisor of the Canadian Securities Transition Office and as a member of the expert panel that recommended creating Ontario’s Financial Services Regulatory Authority, for which he is currently sitting on the board of directors.

Two other newly appointed members of the advisory group are Alan Stewart, partner at Deloitte LLP in Toronto, and Peter Lambertucci, director of the Security Risk Management Office of the Bank of Canada in Ottawa.

Stewart, who has over three decades of experience in forensic accounting and corporate investigations, has acted as national leader of Deloitte’s forensic practice and has managed numerous complex and high-profile investigations including those focused on securities regulation and criminal matters.

Lambertucci is a retired superintendent, assistant criminal operations officer from the RCMP, wherein he led investigations into financial crime in the areas of capital market-related criminal misconduct, national security and money laundering.

The federal government established the IMET program in 2003 as a part of its strategy to improve the protection of capital markets. The program seeks to promote investor confidence in the Canadian capital market and to discourage market fraud via detecting, prosecuting and enforcing action in relation to serious offences.

The RCMP will maintain its stand-alone operational independence and will only present the issues and a general anonymized factual overview of each selected matter to the advisory group.