A broker found guilty of having bought confidential data on Desjardins clients wants to convince the industry watchdog to retract and start the investigation from scratch. According to his lawyer, documents made public recently show that the theft of information only took place after the facts of which he is accused.
Posted at 5:31 p.m.
The disciplinary committee of the Organisme d’autoréglementation du courtage immobilier du Québec (OACIQ) has already decided. According to the organization, Mathieu Joncas acquired information on “150,000 to 200,000” Mouvement clients without their consent. The broker admitted to giving this information to a colleague in January 2017.
The catch: In December, the Superior Court released hundreds of pages of documents relating to the theft investigation, at the request of the media. According to some statements, the main suspect Sébastien Boulanger-Dorval said in May 2019 that he had been selling stolen information “for 15 months”.
According to these confessions, the stolen data could not have been available for resale until February 2018, more than a year after the purchases of lists by Mathieu Joncas.
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Mathieu Joncas acquired information on “150,000 to 200,000” Desjardins Group customers without their consent. The broker admitted to giving this information to a colleague in January 2017.
The Movement also claims that Sébastien Boulanger-Dorval is the only employee suspected of having stolen confidential data.
“These new facts […] make it unlikely that the list comes from a financial institution, says Mathieu Joncas’ lawyer, Olivier Desjardins, in his request. Above all, we can no longer conclude that there is a link between the Respondent and the theft of data from Desjardins, the sole source of which is Mr. Sébastien Boulanger-Dorval. »
During a hearing before the disciplinary committee on Tuesday, Mathieu Joncas’ lawyer, Olivier Desjardins, also invokes the investigation report of the Commission d’accès à l’information (CAI) on the theft, published in December 2020 According to this document, the gaps in security at Desjardins made it possible to draw confidential data from it “over a period of 26 months” before the Movement realized it in May 2019.
According to the Commission’s report, the theft was therefore technically possible from March 2017, two months after the charges against Mathieu Joncas.
Contacted by The Press, Desjardins said he could not comment on the broker’s request for withdrawal. “For our part, the ex-employee exfiltrated data for at least 26 months, as mentioned in the press releases from the commissioners published in 2020”, underlines however the spokesperson Chantal Corbeil.
The report of the Federal Privacy Commissioner of Canada, written in collaboration with the CAI, does mention a period of “at least” 26 months.
$100,000 for lists
Mathieu Joncas admitted to having purchased lists of Desjardins clients containing financial information, paying approximately $100,000 to Jean-Loup Leullier-Masse. The police suspect this private lender from Montmagny of having himself bought stolen data from Sébastien Boulanger-Dorval, before reselling them.
In 2021, Mathieu Joncas had however tried to convince the disciplinary committee that the data he had acquired could be calculated from public sources. Without success. Instead, the organization concluded that it was indeed confidential information that the broker had obtained without consent.
In addition to customer contact information, they contained mortgage balances, interest rates, information on credit used and life insurance premiums.
In September, the Disciplinary Committee also found Mathieu Joncas guilty of not having cooperated in the investigation and of having placed himself in a conflict of interest by acting both as a broker and as a private lender with certain clients.
The OACIQ syndic challenged Mathieu Joncas’ request for retraction on his guilt.
The parties will meet before the Disciplinary Committee on March 24. The real estate brokerage watchdog will then have to decide whether to impose a sanction on the broker, or whether to withdraw its September verdict, and possibly order the resumption of the investigation.
The suspects in the Desjardins data theft investigation have not yet been charged.