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A Quebec Superior Court judge has ordered four insurance companies to pay $2.7 million to the owner of the building in Old Montreal where seven people died in a fire last year.
The decision, made this week in civil court, describes how the four companies refused to pay the owner, Émile Benamor, a Montreal-based defence lawyer, any compensation because he failed to inform them that apartments inside the building were being used as short-term Airbnb rental units and because he did not disclose that he was under investigation for tax evasion when he took out the insurance policies on the building in 2020.
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Besides being ordered to pay $2.7 million as compensation to Benamor, the insurers are also expected to pay him $100,000 in punitive damages.
On March 16, 2023, an accelerant was used inside the building on Place d’Youville to start a fire, which killed seven people and injured nine others. The blaze also destroyed the building.
In the days that followed, questions were raised over how many of the apartments inside were being used as short-term rental units.
The court decision details how a man named Tariq Hasan was renting some units inside the building and that in only three cases did he mention on the leases that they would be used as Airbnb units.
“In fact, everyone is presumed to have acted in good faith (and Benamor) had no reason to believe that Mr. Hasan was not conforming to his legal and contractual obligations,” the court ruled. “What’s more, two (of the four insurers) did not inform (Benamor) that renting units through Airbnb or even as short-term rentals constituted a risk” outside of Benamor’s insurance policies.
“In any event, up until now, no evidence exists that the fire is linked in any way to the rental of apartments through Airbnb.”
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Six months after the fire, Benamor was informed that the four companies were cancelling his policy. They cited the short-term rentals and Benamor’s failure to disclose the tax evasion investigation as their reasons.
The court ruled the decisions were unjustified and that they showed the insurers were using “any pretext” to refuse to compensate him.
Earlier this year, a convicted killer named Denis Bégin revealed in a different civil court case that he was inside the building minutes before the fire began. Bégin is contesting how he was transferred to a more secure federal penitentiary after his presence at the building became news. He claims to know the identity of the person who set the fire and says he offered to reveal the identity to Montreal police in exchange for a statutory release on his current life sentence.
To date, no one has been charged in connection with the fire.
Benamor pleaded guilty to tax evasion in 2021. According to a statement issued by Canada Revenue Agency following the guilty plea, “the investigation showed that, for the 2012 and 2013 tax years, Mr. Benamor failed to report income totalling $469,591 from 21 drafts cashed in a personal bank account and not declared as income. These amounts came from a fraudulent scheme. The CRA’s evidence does not show that at the time the drafts were cashed, Mr. Benamor was aware that the origin of the funds came from such a scheme.”
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