LAT revokes Michel Skaf Enterprise after the dealer's guilty pleas to bank fraud and a counterfeit permanent resident card

On August 27, 2026, the Licence Appeal Tribunal directed the Registrar to revoke the dealer registration of Michel El-Skaf, operating as Michel Skaf Enterprise. The Registrar’s Notice of Proposal, issued October 18, 2025, rested on investigations by Durham Regional Police and OMVIC that ended in two guilty pleas: defrauding a bank of up to $5,000, and possessing a counterfeit permanent resident card in the name of Joe Kadi. The conduct had nothing to do with the dealership, where OMVIC’s own inspector found no non-compliance. The decision, published by CanLII as Michel El-Skaf o/a Michel Skaf Enterprise v Registrar, Motor Vehicle Dealers Act, 2002, 2026 CanLII 89448 (ON LAT), was written by Member Michael Beauchesne after a three-day videoconference hearing on May 27 to 29, 2026. (The decision’s opening paragraph spells the appellant’s first name Michael; the style of cause and OMVIC’s enforcement table use Michel.)

A day lost to the paralegal’s licence

Under Rules 2.20 and 24.1 of the Licence Appeal Tribunal Rules, 2023, a representative must be authorized under the Law Society Act, and on the first morning the Law Society of Ontario’s online directory showed the appellant’s paralegal as “suspended administratively.” The Member stood the hearing down for the whole first day, with both parties’ consent, so the paralegal could sort out his standing. He was back in good standing by day two, the Member checked the directory himself, and the hearing went ahead ([6] to [9]).

Two more procedural fights followed. The Registrar asked to rely on three authorities filed after the case-conference deadline, chief among them Registrar, Motor Vehicle Dealers Act v. 2631273 Ontario Inc., 2026 ONSC 2734, which the decision calls Wilkinson 2. That Divisional Court ruling overturned the 2024 LAT decision (Wilkinson 1) the appellant had built his sanction argument on. Registrar’s counsel had received the endorsement on May 19, eight days before the hearing. The Member let it in. Prejudice to the appellant was real, but “Wilkinson 2 is binding law that should be before the Tribunal” ([13]). The appellant asked for a week to read the two other authorities, Mander and Prime One, and was given about three hours ([14]). The Member also admitted the appellant’s own late evidence, a screenshot proving when his 2023 renewal application went in, because without it he would have been arguing a fraud-adjacent case on uncorroborated testimony alone ([18]).

The Kadi identity

Retired Detective David Jaciuk’s testimony and the appellant’s own cross-examination supplied the facts. At his June 2022 arrest, while trying to open a bank account as Joe Kadi, El-Skaf was carrying three counterfeit identity documents in Kadi’s name: a permanent resident card, an Ontario photo card and a SIN card. The permanent resident card and the photo card carried his own photograph, which he admitted supplying to the counterfeiter, and he confirmed the same person had produced the SIN card. He had obtained a BMO card using forged articles of incorporation naming Kadi as director. Police also seized BRIM, MBNA, Tangerine and TD cards in Kadi’s name ([26] to [27]). Roughly a dozen further charges arising from those items were withdrawn; the two guilty pleas were entered July 10, 2025.

El-Skaf’s account was that Kadi was a friend from 2004 who left Canada in 2005, wanted to keep his Canadian credit rating alive, and in 2022 asked for help keeping money in the country after a foreign bank “just shut down one day” ([29]). Kadi did not testify or sign an affidavit, and every document in evidence pertaining to his identity was manufactured by a counterfeiter. The Member wrote: “I was not pointed to persuasive evidence that established Mr. Kadi as anything other than pure fiction” ([30]). He accepted what El-Skaf admitted doing and rejected why he said he did it ([31]).

Acknowledging under Chauhan that charges and investigations are not proof of guilt, the Member still gave the withdrawn charges “some weight” as past conduct inconsistent with honesty, while finding the evidence fell short of proving the “bust out” credit scheme the detective had described ([32]).

Conduct outside the dealership still counts

The appellant’s central argument was that none of this involved selling cars, and the evidence on that point was on his side. OMVIC Inspector Blake Smiley testified he had investigated the dealership and found no non-compliance, irregularities or complaints of significance. He had noted a vehicle inventory at El-Skaf’s home but found no evidence of sales from that unregistered location. El-Skaf said he had never been reprimanded since starting in the industry around 2009 ([34]).

The Member held that confining the analysis to the dealership would be an error of law. Ontario v. Mander, 2018 ONSC 1795, had reversed the Tribunal for exactly that, on facts involving an outstanding arrest warrant unrelated to the dealership. The Court of Appeal’s Famous Flesh Gordon’s standard lets the Registrar rely on “any past or present conduct” that gives reasonable grounds for belief, a threshold “less than a balance of probabilities but more than mere suspicion” ([35] to [36]). He also found a nexus, because car sales are financial transactions between consumers, dealers and banks, so a fraudulent banking transaction and “possessing counterfeit identification to facilitate deception” are directly relevant to whether a dealer will carry on business honestly ([38]). That satisfied ground s. 6(1)(a)(ii), and with one ground proven the Member did not decide the s. 6(1)(f) breach-of-condition or s. 6(1)(a)(iii) false-statement grounds at all ([41]).

The appellant’s Charter argument, that revocation would infringe his mobility right to pursue a livelihood under s. 6(2), failed on procedure. He had not served notice of a constitutional question on the Attorneys General under s. 109 of the Courts of Justice Act, so the Tribunal could not consider it ([39]).

Why conditions were refused

El-Skaf asked the Tribunal to use its s. 9(5) substitution power and let him keep his registration on conditions: an ethics and management course, plus OMVIC’s standard terms. He filed character letters and described an MBA, church volunteering and a refusal to declare bankruptcy after a failed partnership. The Registrar conceded no one had been harmed but argued that harm should not be a prerequisite to revocation ([44] to [47]).

The Member gave the character letters reduced weight because none was sworn and no author appeared as a witness ([46]). The three authorities the appellant relied on were each distinguished:

• Pilon (forged signatures resolved by a fine and ethics training) was not analogous because, in the Member’s words, “the matter before me involves deception of much greater sophistication than simply forging signatures,” with a counterfeiter and manufactured government ID ([48]).
• Bluewave involved a similar criminal sentence, a conditional discharge with 12 months of unsupervised probation, but the Tribunal there found the appellant credible, put his failures down to a lack of due diligence rather than deliberate deceit, and heard from two character witnesses ([53]).
• Wilkinson 1 was quashed by Wilkinson 2. The Member still considered its surviving point, that prior regulatory history matters to remedy, but the Divisional Court’s rule now governs, and where misconduct involves dishonesty “the usual remedy is revocation,” with lesser sanctions reserved for “minor, isolated defalcation.” One arrest did not make this isolated, since El-Skaf had used the Kadi cards from about 2006 onward, “a large menu of dishonest conduct” sustained over years ([50] to [52]).

The Member also rejected education as a remedy. El-Skaf testified that “in the beginning, he did not like it” but that Kadi “really put the pressure on me.” The Member read that as minimizing, and concluded he could not “see how education can address what is essentially a character deficit as opposed to a lack of knowledge or understanding” ([49]).

The order under s. 9(5) directs the Registrar to carry out the revocation in full ([54]).

The clean-record argument has less room than it did

Vaughan Fine Touch kept its registration on a long honest history and contraventions confined to a single sale the principal knew nothing about, and Gardiner Motors traded revocation for conditions. El-Skaf’s dealership record was cleaner than either, with nothing found by OMVIC’s inspector ([34]). The reach of s. 6(1)(a)(ii) decided the case instead. Under Mander and Famous Flesh Gordon’s the Registrar can rely on criminal dishonesty anywhere in a registrant’s life, and this Member tied it to the business through the bank relationship that every financed sale runs on ([38]).

Wilkinson 2 will shape the hearings that follow as much as it shaped this one. The appellant’s best authority was quashed on appeal while his own appeal was pending, and the Registrar’s counsel at this hearing had represented the Registrar in that appeal ([11]). A dealer citing LAT sanction decisions from the last two years now argues against a Divisional Court presumption.