Posts Tagged Canada
Charity loses status over tax-shelter scam CRA says area group took in $2.8 million, but spent just $282,000
The Canada Revenue Agency has stripped an Ottawa-area charity of its charitable status after a damning two-year audit showed it was a front for a tax shelter scam offering big receipts for small donations.
The CRA ruling found that Healing and Assistance Not Dependence Canada expended a “proportionally negligible amount” of its income on charitable activities, making it ineligible to grant tax receipts.
The law says a charity must act exclusively for a charitable purpose to give tax receipts.
The charity purports to “encourage and assist and serve alcoholics, chemically dependent persons and their families, friends and associates primarily, but not exclusively within the Jewish community.” It has no website and no listing in the Yellow Pages.
Tax shelters allow people to avoid paying income tax. Tax-free savings accounts and RRSPs are examples of legal tax shelters.
Illegal, so-called aggressive shelters promise inflated tax receipts for nominal donations.
A company might ask you for a donation of $100 and promise you a tax receipt for $1,000. The company might claim your money is buying bulk supplies that,
if purchased individually, would be worth $1,000.
Aggressive tax shelters essentially sell receipts, pocketing the donations and bilking the federal government out of millions.
CRA spokeswoman Caitline Workman said tax receipts can be revoked if the government believes the donor should have realized the return was too good to be true, however, she would not say if the agency would revoke receipts donated to Healing and Assistance Not Dependence Canada.
The CRA audit, which took place between Sept. 1, 2006, and Aug. 31, 2008, showed the charity received almost $2.8 million from the Canadian International Aid Program, a registered tax shelter fronted by the Canadian Organization for International Philanthropy (COIP). Healing and Assistance Not Dependence Canada transferred 70 per cent of the money it received to other participants in the scheme, keeping $900,000 for itself. Of this, only $282,000 was devoted to charitable programs.
Even this figure is doubtful. Healing and Assistance Not Dependence Canada claimed to contract out its treatment services to American and Swiss treatment centres, but the CRA found there were no descriptions of how programs were to be delivered on the charity’s behalf.
The auditor wrote “the charity did not, in fact, deliver any of the charitable addiction counselling, treatment, or education programs for which it was ostensibly raising funds.
The CRA also found that 79 per cent of the charity’s income was spent on fundraising, which far exceeds the “reasonable” amount proscribed by law.
The true purpose of the charity, said the CRA, was to receive and transfer donations on behalf of the tax shelter program.
The money the charity funnelled out landed in questionable pockets. Almost $2 million was transferred to the Orion Foundation and PanAggregate Financial Corporation. Orion was the subject of an investigation by the Toronto Star, which found that its head, James Arion (who has gone by many other names), was giving $2,000 tax receipts for $1,000 donations. The CRA is challenging many of those receipts.
The Star showed the Orion Foundation is also connected to the Canadian International Aid Program and COIP, which claims to provide AIDS drugs to infected Africans.
No one from Orion, PanAggregate or COIP would provide comment to the Citizen.
http://www.ottawacitizen.com/business/fp/Charity+loses+status+over+shelter+scam/1675746/story.html
Reviewed by Moishe Alexander
Property Woes Slam Cities Across Continent, But Not Vancouver
Moishe Alexander, CFC CEO : there is a basis for careful optimism.
The picturesque city of Vancouver, Canada, has turned into an unexpected oasis in the bleak desert of the commercial real-estate market.
In most cities in the U.S. and Canada, sales activity has frozen to a standstill. Would-be sellers are unwilling to accept the steep drops in value of office buildings, shopping centers and other commercial property. Even if they were, buyers can’t get financing.
But then there’s Vancouver, a city of about 578,000 people with views of the Pacific Ocean and the Coast Mountain range. Its office market has logged seven building transactions this year capped off by Germany-based Deka Immobilien’s recent $263 million purchase of Bentall V, a 33-story tower in the heart of the city’s district. Just as impressive, prices have held up well. By contrast, only five office properties valued at $5 million or more have sold in Manhattan in the first two quarters of this year, and average prices paid are off 32%, according to Real Capital Analytics, a New York-based real-estate research firm.
First of all, Vancouver’s office market hasn’t suffered the sharp increase in vacancies seen in most other cities. Vacancies are ticking up and putting pressure on rents. But the diversified economy, driven by a mix of companies that include mining, lumber and port-related businesses, and a lack of significant new construction leave it better positioned to weather the stormy global economy, brokers say. The first-quarter office vacancy in downtown Vancouver was 4.2%, below downtown Toronto’s 5.7% and downtown Calgary’s 6.9%, according to CB Richard Ellis. “It’s quite incredible compared to the rest of the country,” says David Eger, senior director with the Toronto-based Altus Group.
Such a high volume of sales is unusual for Vancouver, a city where small investors and pension funds are known for buying and holding properties. The seven office transactions that took place this year through May in downtown Vancouver, a city with a total of about 21 million square feet of office space, compared with two transactions in the year-earlier period, according to CB Richard Ellis.
But amid the global financial crisis, institutions have looked first at properties that have retained value as a less painful means of unlocking equity in their portfolios. The seller of Bentall V was SITQ Vancouver Inc., a real-estate subsidiary of Canadian pension fund Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec. SITQ says it wasn’t under pressure to sell the building and only did so after getting an unsolicited bid. “We made a profit. That’s why we sold it,” says Amelie Plante, an SITQ spokeswoman. “It was very satisfying.”
Buyers in Vancouver have included Canadian pension funds and private investors, CB Richard Ellis says. Deka Immobilien Investment GmbH is a real-estate asset manager and a subsidiary of the DekaBank Group. The seven deals this year have had a total value of C$502 million (US$449 million).
By contrast, Manhattan, with some 1.6 million residents and about 366 million square feet of office space, saw the number of large office transactions this year through May slip to just five deals valued at a total of $984 million, from 45 sales in the year-earlier period, according to Real Capital Analytics. The average price paid per square foot in Vancouver this year fell just 2% to C$355 from the year-earlier period, compared with a 32% drop in Manhattan to $451.
The Bentall property sale price also has given hope to area sellers worried by deep discounting seen elsewhere. The nearly 100%-occupied building sold for a price that equates to a capitalization rate in the 6% range, just slightly higher than the 5.5% range it might have traded at during the height of the market a year or so ago, according to Jim Szabo, executive vice president with CB Richard Ellis, which represented Deka Immobilien in the transaction. Cap rates are closely watched valuation metrics in the commercial real-estate industry derived by dividing a building’s net operating income by the price paid.
http://futurerealestate.blogspot.com/2009/06/property-woes-slam-cities-across.html
Moshe Alexander Donates to Canadian Police Association
Moshe Alexander and Canadian Funding Corp. donated $25.00 CDN to the Canadian Police Association (http://www.cpa-acp.ca) in 2008.
About the CPA:
The Canadian Police Association (CPA) is the national voice for 57,000 police personnel across Canada. Membership includes police personnel serving in 170 police services across Canada, from Canada’s smallest towns and villages as well as those working in our largest municipal and provincial police services, and members of the RCMP, railway police, and first nations police personnel.