The Bordeleau method | The Press

The businessman uses stratagems “to ensnare his prey”, according to his business partners

On his YouTube channel, Christian Bordeleau, aka The Real Estate Doctor, is brimming with confidence: “I’ve been to Harvard, I’ve been to LSE [London School of Economics], I went to Oxford. I do not know anyone […] who has the kind of CV that I have, that I bring to real estate,” he told his audience.

The holder of a doctorate in public policy from Carleton University, who calls himself a “doctor of economics” and who describes himself as an “academic luminary” on Facebook, does not skimp on the video sequences magnifying his success. Between two workouts at the gym, we sometimes see him on the streets of Gatineau aboard a flamboyant Mustang GT500 Shelby, sometimes at the controls of a BMW motorcycle or a mechanical excavator, explaining the art of real estate.

In March 2023, the house of cards on which the Real Estate Doctor built this spectacular success collapsed.

His business partners, believing themselves to be victims of fraudulent maneuvers which would have allowed Christian Bordeleau to steal 1.7 million from them, obtained a series of injunctions leading to the seizure of his assets and his Chelsea home. The police officers present found an assault weapon in a suspended ceiling of the basement, we read in an affidavit from the bailiff on file. This discovery led to a criminal charge of careless storage of a Kriss Vector 9mm firearm.

He also faces charges of criminal harassment against a person close to him, for acts which allegedly occurred in the following weeks. He pleaded not guilty in both cases.

None of these cases has yet been heard on the merits by the courts.

Mr. Bordeleau refused to grant us an interview. He claims by email that the seizure was authorized “on the basis of false affidavits”. “ [Mes ex-partenaires] use the money from my companies to suffocate me financially” in order to “recover my shares by making me bankrupt,” he maintains.

“Exceptional and extremely useful” work

The explosion of flashy images that Christian Bordeleau published just before his fall contrasts with his quiet university career. In 2012, after having signed several opinion texts in The duty denouncing corruption and ethical failings in Quebec, he set up Intangible Gouvernance, a consulting company which created the IGO 9002 certification in “ethics and good municipal governance”. In the midst of a crisis of confidence caused by the revelations of the Charbonneau commission, the company enjoyed resounding success, winning the Gaz Métro Public Prize on 14^e Quebec entrepreneurship competition.

It was during the same period that Christian Bordeleau approached the former director of the Anti-Collusion Unit of the Quebec government, Jacques Duchesneau, then an opposition MP with the Coalition Avenir Québec (CAQ), to promote his ethical certification.

The former Montreal police chief signed a letter of recommendation for Christian Bordeleau a few years later, highlighting his “exceptional and extremely useful” work in developing a report on anti-corruption performance indicators for the National Assembly. .

” I am in shock ! », Reacted Mr. Duchesneau, when The Press summarized the main points of his legal misadventures.

In 2019, Christian Bordeleau used this letter of recommendation to land a new job as head of finance at MREX, a training college for real estate managers.

A big lifestyle

He then began to invest in various real estate projects, and quickly boasted on social networks of having exploded MREX’s revenues by “600%”.

But in February 2023, a report from the firm Quantum Juricomptable concluded that Christian Bordeleau, who had “full access to the preparation of payrolls and checks to pay suppliers” as head of finance of MREX, having personally paid and its companies more than 1.3 million in unjustified payments, between 2019 and 2022.

The document notes that he was also paid by the company for four vehicles simultaneously – two Mustangs, a Lincoln Aviator and a Ford F-250 pickup truck – totaling payments that exceeded the amount he was authorized by $88,667.

The forensic accounting report shows that he also extensively used the Amex credit card provided by the company to pay for personal expenses, including a subscription to the dating site Seeking Arrangement at US$99 per month, $16,000 worth of furniture, a mountain bike at $5,166, and $2,850 for a child’s hockey fees.

The MREX forensic accountant who concluded that there was an embezzlement of $1.7 million is based on the premise that Mr. Bordeleau was hired at a salary of $104,000, plus expenses, bonuses and company car.

Mr. Bordeleau claims that he instead signed a contract granting him an annual salary of $278,000, a difference which alone represents 1.1 million out of the 1.7 million. He submitted as evidence to this effect a photo of an “employment contract” allegedly signed by the CEO of MREX, Nikolaï Ray.

However, Mr. Ray and his partners “plead that this document is a forgery and that the president never signed it,” wrote judge Judith Harvie, in an interim decision renewing the seizure order against Mr. Bordeleau in March 2023. “There is every reason to believe that Bordeleau and his companies have incriminating documents in their possession,” adds the magistrate.

A pen ready to write your economic texts

The MREX forensic accounting report maintains that Mr. Bordeleau also used company funds to pay a finance student, Emmanuel Gélinas-Desrosiers, to write in his name around twenty texts on the economy on the Medium website.

Joined by The Press, Mr. Gélinas-Desrosiers asserts that Mr. Bordeleau ordered texts from him with a fairly clear political orientation, and that he attributed them to himself by changing only a few words on occasion. “He still owes me around $10,000,” he says.

The texts appear on a page titled “D^r Christian Bordeleau Ph. D.”, but Mr. Bordeleau maintains that they were published “on behalf of the brand and marketing” of MREX.

“He brags in his Real Estate Doctor clips that he studied at Harvard, Oxford and lots of big universities, but what he doesn’t say is that these are online microprograms that he did. That’s his method: he takes true information, which he magnifies as much as possible to ensnare his prey,” says Joël Lavoie, one of the MREX shareholders who are suing him.

Mr. Bordeleau sent us a statement showing that he filed a complaint for harassment against Mr. Lavoie with the MRC des Collines-de-l’Outaouais police.