Losing money in a financial scam is a blow in itself.

Feeling that nobody cares just makes it worse.

"I'm not looking for pity. But people should know (how vulnerable they are). I'm not an idiot, it happened to me, and it could happen to you unless the system starts providing more protection for citizens," Bruno Pelletier says.

A successful Quebec recording artist best known for his starring role in the celebrated musical Notre Dame de Paris, Pelletier is now shining a spotlight on the 2005 collapse of Montrealbased Mount Real Corp. He was one of the 1,600 investors who lost an estimated $130 million.

Like many of the victims, he wonders why the Norbourg and Earl Jones scandals appeared to be a greater priority for the media, regulators and legal system.

Pelletier, 48, says he lost about $200,000 in Mount Real and a further $50,000 when another scandalwracked investment company from Quebec, Norshield Asset Management, also tanked in 2005.

Pelletier said a neighbour (and former friend) was an independent financial adviser and he's the one who proposed and steered him into Mount Real promissory notes then paying eight or nine per cent.

It was a publicly traded company, audited by professionals and the interest was paid regularly at first, which reassured him, Pelletier said.

"My career was going well a decade ago, I sold a lot of records and for the first time in my life I had money to invest," he said.

He had no inkling of any trouble until another friend emailed him a newspaper story that raised doubts about Mount Real. "I immediately called my adviser, who said the story was bull----."

Two months later, Mount Real was history.

"I lost everything," Pelletier said.

"It's not money I can easily replace because the music business has changed dramatically since then."

Initially skeptical that he'd ever get money back, Pelletier says he's encouraged by the recent out-ofcourt settlement in the Norbourg class-action suit that will see all 9,200 investors in its mutual funds getting back almost all their capital.

Like 90 per cent of the Norbourg clients, Mount Real investors initially were told they weren't eligible for payments from the indemnity fund of Quebec securities regulator L'Autorité des marchés financiers. They responded the same way: by initiating a class-action suit.

In the Norbourg case, the AMF reversed course just before the suit was scheduled to go to trial earlier this year and agreed to put $20 million into a $55-million settlement package.

The Mount Real group, however, still is waiting for a hearing to get its class-action suit authorized by the courts.

"We've been waiting almost six years for some resolution," Pelletier said. "A few advisers have had their knuckles rapped. There's been nothing for us. A lot of people are broken, discouraged, fatalistic. Some had to go back to work. It's like we've been forgotten."

pdelean@ montrealgazette.com
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