Court learns of Guido Amsel’s fraud complaint filed against ex-wife

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This article was published 16/11/2017 (2633 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Before he was accused of trying to kill his ex-wife and local lawyers with bombs delivered through the mail, Guido Amsel went to police with a fraud complaint.

Amsel, now 51, believed his ex-wife was stealing money from their Winnipeg autobody business, and he turned to a commercial crimes investigator for help, Amsel’s attempted murder trial heard Thursday.

However, police didn’t believe there was enough evidence to launch a criminal investigation. Instead, Amsel was told his best option was a civil lawsuit.

Four years later, his ex-wife and lawyers who worked on that lawsuit were the alleged targets of explosive packages mailed within Winnipeg. One of them, delivered to a River Avenue office, detonated and seriously injured lawyer Maria Mitousis.

In a testimony Crown attorney Chris Vanderhooft suggested could point to the accused’s motive, RCMP Sgt. Dan Bresciani told court Thursday he met the accused in August 2011 to hear about Amsel’s suspicions that almost $4 million was missing from his business, Eurotech Auto Body.

The sales were unreported and Amsel believed his ex-wife was transferring money from the business account to her parents in Germany. The couple divorced in 2004, court heard, and Iris Amsel remained Eurotech’s bookkeeper at least until 2009.

However, there wasn’t evidence of a crime, Bresciani said.

“He seemed upset, frustrated,” Bresciani said of his meeting with Guido Amsel, who brought along a binder of documents dating to 1992. “And you know, I felt bad for him because he talked about the divorce and he talked about some of the personal things he had been going through. I wanted to see him get the help he needed.

“I just didn’t know if we were the ones that could help him.”

Bresciani said Amsel told him an accounting firm had reviewed Eurotech’s financial records.

The officer also reviewed the binder, which Amsel said included documents showing some cars were sold for less than they were worth, with the amount of cash received being higher than the amount listed on the invoices. But it was “hard to tell,” the commercial crimes investigator said, whether the records showed criminality or just poor bookkeeping.

“I considered that suspicious, but that could be something that the CRA would have more of a concern about,” he said.

“In the end, the concerns that I had was that there was no forensic audit (done) and that we would need one before we could even go to the next step of investigating his complaint,” Bresciani said, adding police had no grounds to get search warrants or production orders based on the information Amsel presented.

“Mr. Amsel was not happy with my opinion,” Bresciani said.

After he informed Amsel the RCMP wouldn’t be launching a criminal investigation, Bresciani said he told Amsel he should talk to a lawyer, saying his “best avenue” would be civil litigation. Amsel was already involved in a legal process at the time, but he told the officer he believed his ex-wife and her parents should be in jail, according to Bresciani’s testimony.

Amsel later launched a public complaint against Bresciani, alleging neglect of duty over his decision not to investigate. The complaint was resolved after Bresciani called Amsel to apologize.

“I apologized for maybe not being clear enough with my explanation. To be honest, I thought I was,” Bresciani said. “I wasn’t apologizing for my opinion.”

It’s been six years since Bresciani’s meeting with Amsel, and the officer admitted his memory of it wasn’t perfectly clear.

When the Crown asked him if he saw Amsel in the courtroom Thursday, Bresciani gestured toward Amsel’s defence lawyer, Jeremy Kostiuk, saying, “He looks a lot different than I remember.”

Amsel was seated in the prisoner’s box next to a sheriff’s officer.

Amsel has pleaded not guilty to several charges, including five counts of attempted murder. His provincial court trial is set to continue until mid-December in front of Judge Tracey Lord.

katie.may@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @thatkatiemay