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Canadian theatre producers sentenced for fraud

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Wednesday, August 5, 2009

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Garth Drabinsky and Myron Gottlieb, founders of Live Entertainment Corporation of Canada, Inc. (Livent) in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, were sentenced Wednesday to concurrent prison terms for corporate fraud and forgery which resulted in millions of dollars in losses to their investors for close to a decade. Drabinsky received four years on one count and seven years on a second count. Gottlieb got four years and six years on two counts of fraud.

"No one is above the law. No one gets to write his own rules," said Ontario Superior Court Justice Mary Lou Benotto. "Corporate fraud such as this results in tangible losses to employees, creditors and investors." File:Freddyphantom.jpg

The Phantom of the Opera
(Image missing from Commons: image; log)

Senior executives Drabinsky, Gottlieb, Robert Topol, and Gorden Eckstein were all charged by the RCMP in 2002. Eckstein pleaded guilty to fraud and testified at the court cast against Drabinsky and Gottleib. Topol had his trial stayed due to adjournments and delays.

The Livent company had produced plays such as The Phantom of the Opera, Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, Show Boat, and Ragtime in Toronto, before its sale to Michael Ovitz in 1998. Ovitz ordered an audit of the company following which it went bankrupt by the year's end. Livent filed a CA$ 225 million lawsuit against the former chairman Drabinsky and former president Gottlieb, who were summarily dismissed.

Drabinsky and Gottlieb are also facing charges in the United States for misrepresentations of financial worth to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.


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  This page is archived, and is no longer publicly editable.
Articles presented on Wikinews reflect the specific time at which they were written and published, and do not attempt to encompass events or knowledge which occur or become known after their publication.

Got a correction? Add the template {{editprotected}} to the talk page along with your corrections, and it will be brought to the attention of the administrators.

Please note that due to our archival policy, we will not alter or update the content of articles that are archived, but will only accept requests to make grammatical and formatting corrections.

Note that some listed sources or external links may no longer be available online due to age.

The text of this article is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 License


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