Some of Richard A. Wilson’s unhappy customers have been waiting as long as 10 years to get their money back for work that he didn’t do.
Their wait isn’t entirely over, but as of Friday they’re now in a position to get some of it back. The 59-year-old marine contractor was ordered in Kingston’s Superior Court to pay $120,000 restitution to 13 individuals and one business, Vaughn Building Supplies of Wolfe Island.
He was also fined $71,082 “in lieu of forfeiture” under a section of the Criminal Code that permits that money, as well, to be directed back into restitution.
Superior Court Justice Michael Quigley has, however, given Wilson another five years to pay the fine — after he completes a two-year conditional sentence in the community.
If he fails to pay in that time, he faces the prospect of 18 months in jail.
Wilson was charged in April 2013 with a long list of fraud-related offences arising mainly from his failure to complete or in some cases even start shoreline projects, such as docks and retaining walls, he’d contracted to build and for which he’d been paid in advance.
At the time, according to Kingston Police, he was associated with Limestone Marine and Limestone Aggregates.
His case plodded through the legal process for 32 months until a preliminary hearing on the charges was finally completed in Kingston’s Ontario Court of Justice at the end of January last year. No sooner had Wilson been ordered to stand trial in Superior Court, however, he was immediately arrested on a single new charge of defrauding a customer and simultaneously violating a condition of bail that forbid him accepting advance payments for jobs.
He ended up spending 45 days in pretrial custody, pled guilty to the single fraud count in May 2016, and was placed on probation for a year afterward.
The bulk of the accusations against him were ostensibly going to trial, however, and had already been channeled by then into a system of resolution meetings with the Crown attorney’s office and judicial pretrial conferences that draw judges into the deal making mix.
Then, at the end of July this year, following yet another judicial pretrial between the lawyers and a judge, Wilson opted to abandon trial and pleaded guilty to 14 counts of fraud over $5,000 committed between 2006 and 2013.
Read the full story over at thewhig.com
