"Hard Bargaining"
Mr. Karimi and his wife, Nava Vosough, have had criminal charges brought against them; he nine charges including extortion and attempted extortion, possession of the proceeds of crime and criminal harassment, and she with attempted extortion and criminal harassment.
Mr. Karimi claims that employees at his convenience stores have, over time, robbed him of over a million dollars and he has launched civil lawsuits to that effect. It was his right, according to his lawyer, to demand from his employees the return of hundreds of thousands of dollars they had criminally extracted from him.
Prosecutors, on the other hand, allege that Mr. Karimi extorted the money from the employees under threats that he would have them deported from Canada as it was he who had legal status and they were present on the basis of student and work visas. Those employees, all from Iran, and all of them uncertain of Canadian laws, were fearful when their employer threatened to call police.
Mr. Karimi had suspected his three employees of having taken money from his chain of stores for a prolonged period of time. He undertook to recover the money he felt was rightfully his by threatening them, by demanding that they execute letters of confession, and by forcing them to turn over to him all the money they had in their personal bank accounts.
The defence claims to have a series of recorded telephone conversations between one of the former employees and a friend in Iran where, the friend claims, Farzad Panahi, one of the accusers of Mr. Karimi, admits to having stolen $200,000 from his employer. In the telephone conversations Mr. Panahi also appears to implicate the other two employees in theft.
What is puzzling, among other things, is how so much money could have been available to be pilfered by unscrupulous employees working in convenience stores. And how so much money having gone missing, would not have been obviously missing. And why, if Mr. Karimi suspected that he was being so drastically short-changed in his trust of his employees with respect to his profit margin, he would continue to keep them employed.
Why not, under those circumstances, go to the police and lodge an official complaint, rather than become abusively extortionate and threatening? The intrigues and dark menace in this case seem peculiar. In any event, as the Crown prosecutor observed, the mere suspicion that someone is a thief does not entitle the owner to the pursuit of criminal acts of his own.
"Because an employer thinks you are a thief, he cannot demand a confession, he cannot demand your bank account numbers, he cannot go to a bank and drain your accounts."
Labels: Justice, Ottawa, Social-Cultural Deviations