The campaign in british
Columbia to toughen up criminal prosecution of securities offenders suffered a setback last month when the inspector in charge of the RCMP’s securities force in Vancouver was turfed from his job and suspended with pay.

Inspector Bill Majcher, 43, was removed as head of the RCMP integrated market enforcement team June 29, and suspended the next day, pending the outcome of an internal investigation. RCMP officials refuse to say why they took the action, but there is no suggestion of any criminal misconduct. “I cannot comment on any personnel issues; that is standard RCMP policy,” says
spokesman Brent Mudry.

Whatever the outcome of the investigation, it is clear Majcher will not return to his post.
The RCMP has already announced that Insp. George Pemberton, 46, head of the RCMP integrated proceeds of crime unit, will take over the position in August.

Majcher made headlines in 2002 when he posed as the financial front man for a Colombian drug cartel that purportedly had millions of dollars of cocaine money to launder. His undercover work, which exposed him to considerable physical risk, led to the conviction and incarceration of notorious Vancouver underworld figure Martin Chambers, Howe Street stock promoter Kevan Garner, Toronto lawyer Simon Rosenfeld and several other conspirators.

Majcher was rewarded by being catapulted from corporal to inspector and placed in charge of the new IMET program in Vancouver.

IMET is a Canada-wide initiative designed to fight stock market crime and restore investor confidence in the wake of WorldCom Inc.,
Enron Corp. and other market scandals.
There are teams in Toronto, Montreal, Calgary and Vancouver. The Vancouver team was officially inaugurated in December 2003. It has a dozen members and a $3-million annual budget. A second team is to be installed in Vancouver in September.

The program received a warm welcome from the B.C. Securities Commission , which has long lobbied for tougher criminal prosecution of securities-related crimes. In the late 1990s, the B.C. attorney-general’s office, the BCSC and local RCMP created a securities fraud office to pursue stock market crimes. It generated only a handful of convictions on relatively minor charges and was shut down after three years.

Vancouver IMET began operations under Majcher’s leadership in February 2004.
Although it is not clear exactly what precipitated his departure, there appears to be several areas of concern.

First, the Vancouver team has been in place for nearly 18 months and has yet to secure a single criminal charge. This is not, in itself, cause for alarm, as stock market cases are usually tricky to prosecute. However, it appears that Majcher wasn’t going to wait. In May, he ran for the federal Conservative nomination in Richmond, B.C. The bid was unsuccessful, but RCMP policy stipulates members must take an unpaid leave of absence if they are seeking political office.
And some RCMP members were dismayed that Majcher was considering jumping ship when IMET was still in its formative stage.

Asked why he had sought the nomination, Majcher got himself into more hot water. He complained that Crown counsel had been reluctant to approve criminal charges that his group had recommended, and he thought he might be able to make a bigger impact in politics. Although it is common for police members — even senior police officials — to grumble about the Crown’s reluctance to lay charges, it is an unwritten rule to avoid public criticism of the Crown.

Finally, Majcher failed to refute in a definitive way a statement by Garner, who had returned to Vancouver after serving a 15-month jail sentence in the U.S. for money laundering, that he and Majcher were about to sign a movie deal on the sting operation.
It is not certain that such a deal was ever in the works, but Majcher’s lack of clarity about the subject raised eyebrows because Garner is a convicted felon.

The impact on Vancouver IMET’s performance is difficult to gauge. It still has the same core base of staff and systems, and the appointment of a new and more experienced administrator to the top position could facilitate charge approval.

At this point, however, the hard reality is the team has still not laid a single criminal charge. IE