A Court of Queen’s Bench judge has awarded former Winnipeg lawyer Hersh Wolch a judgment of about $215,000 for the unpaid balance and interest on his former house that he sold to Costas Ataliotis in 1999.
Associate chief Justice Jeffrey Oliphant ruled the numbers backing the claim by Ataliotis, one of the former principals at failed businesses Protos International and Maple Leaf Distillers, that he had indeed paid off the balance owing, simply didn’t add up.
Court documents show the two agreed on a selling price of $375,000 for the Park Boulevard home, with Ataliotis assuming a $240,000 mortgage and agreeing to pay $135,000 in cash. Shortly after, Ataliotis asked if he could delay paying the balance for a short period of time and put the money into Protos instead, a company in which Wolch was a shareholder.
“What Mr. Ataliotis did was, to the best of his ability, hide the fact that he had not injected the cash into the company by playing what I have referred to as a financial shell game,” Oliphant wrote in his decision.
Oliphant ruled that Wolch has an unpaid vendor’s lien on the property and, subject to an appeal by Ataliotis, can set its sale in motion to claim the money owed to him.
Dave Hill, Wolch’s lawyer, said this decision is also good news for another group of Winnipeg investors, led by former Winnipeg Jets captain Thomas Steen, who are owed $875,000 by Ataliotis and his former business partner, David Wolinsky.
“They have a judgment against the property but their judgment doesn’t give them the right to ask for a sale for over a year. Hersh’s judgement is right away,” he said.
The Steen group has estimated the Park Boulevard house has a resale value of between $750,000 and $850,000.
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