As a result of a criminal conviction, an Alberta man has been permanently banned from participating in the province’s capital markets by the Alberta Securities Commission (ASC).
David John Del Bianco was found guilty of defrauding investors in January 2023.
Between March 2010 and December 2014, Del Bianco promoted a legal services insurance start-up company to investors that he called Equal Rights. He said it would provide profits as well as legal help, if needed, for a monthly fee. Instead of investing in any such business, Del Bianco redirected more than $500,000 in investors’ funds to pay for his personal travel, living expenses and mortgage bills.
In December 2023, he was sentenced to four and a half years in prison and ordered to pay restitution of nearly $230,000.
In handing down the penalty, the ASC panel noted that Del Bianco held information sessions about the made-up business in rural areas in the 2000s, and targeted inexperienced investors with a “lack of financial sophistication.”
The panel quoted the trial judge, who noted that the investors’ losses were exacerbated by their limited financial means, and therefore were comparable to “a multi-million-dollar fraud committed against richer and more sophisticated investors.”
“Del Bianco engaged in one of the more serious forms of securities-related misconduct for personal gain at the expense of unsuspecting and vulnerable Albertans,” the ASC panel wrote in its decision, issued on Tuesday. “The public interest demands the strongest message of deterrence that we can deliver – permanent market-access bans.”
The panel noted that while Del Bianco had no previous criminal convictions, he was previously sanctioned related to his promotion of Equal Rights. in 2002, Del Bianco was placed under a four-year ban on trading in securities and from holding corporate office for contravening Alberta securities laws. In 2008, he was found guilty of having flouted that market access ban. As a result, he was placed under a permanent securities trading ban that was reduced to eight years on appeal.