LAT refuses to revoke Vaughan Fine Touch over a rogue detailer's Pathfinder sale, and strips OMVIC's $25,000 letter-of-credit conditions

On July 24, 2026, the Licence Appeal Tribunal denied the Registrar’s proposal to revoke the registrations of Vaughan Fine Touch Auto Collision Inc. and its principal, Jonathan Aguiar-Ninguem, and ordered the Registrar to remove five conditions it had already imposed on the dealer’s registration, including the requirement for a $25,000 irrevocable letter of credit in favour of the Motor Vehicle Dealers Compensation Fund. None of the LAT decisions covered on this site had subtracted existing conditions before. The decision, published by CanLII as Aguiar-Ninguem and Vaughan Fine Touch Auto Collision Inc. v Registrar, Motor Vehicle Dealers Act, 2022, 2026 CanLII 77464 (ON LAT), was written by Member Bernard Trottier. (The style of cause on CanLII gives the Act’s year as 2022; the statute is the Motor Vehicle Dealers Act, 2002.)

A collision shop that sells cars on the side

Vaughan Fine Touch has been a collision-repair business for over 17 years, fixing referral work from dealers and wholesalers, including vehicles worth more than $450,000. In 2015 it registered as a dealer, and Ninguem as a salesperson, to keep staff busy during slow periods: buy insurance write-offs at auction, repair them, sell them, roughly 750 vehicles since 2015. In March 2024, Ninguem opened a satellite dealer location near his home called Georgina Motors. The venture failed. Its dealer registration expired on March 2, 2025, and the site closed at the end of May 2025.

Trouble started with an October 17, 2024 records inspection at Vaughan Fine Touch, which found bill-of-sale disclosure failures across eight vehicles (delivery dates, odometer disclosure, accident damage over $3,000, a total-loss declaration, trade-in information, among others) and an outstanding HST liability of $188,436.61 owed to the CRA. The Registrar responded with a September 4, 2025 Notice of Proposal to attach 41 terms and conditions to the dealer’s registration, including, at items 8 through 12, the $25,000 letter of credit. Vaughan Fine Touch did not appeal, and under s. 9(4) the Registrar carried that NOP out on February 3, 2026.

The same day, the Registrar issued a second NOP, this one proposing to revoke both registrations.

The Pathfinder sale

The revocation case centred on one transaction. Vaughan Fine Touch bought a 2013 Nissan Pathfinder, a declared total loss with a $13,538 collision claim on its history report, from Impact Auto Auctions in February 2024 for $6,154.66. On May 10, 2025, a consumer the decision calls EM saw a Facebook Marketplace ad, drove to Georgina Motors, and bought the vehicle for $6,500 from DS, a detailer who had worked there since March 2024. DS was not registered as a salesperson. The location’s dealer registration had expired ten weeks earlier. The bill of sale was missing most required information, carried a handwritten “3 Months Warranty” that did not exist, and was signed by no salesperson. An active lien registered by the dealership’s floor-plan financier had not been discharged, even though the underlying loan had been fully paid a month before the sale.

EM reported mechanical problems, complained to OMVIC on June 23, 2025, and Vaughan Fine Touch bought the vehicle back for $6,000 on July 15, 2025. Ninguem terminated DS’s employment by August 7, 2025.

DS testified that he did not know only a registered salesperson could sell a vehicle, that Ninguem had told him not to speak to customers about sales, and that he thought he was doing the business a favour by moving a vehicle off the lot during the wind-down.

Real contraventions, no pattern

The Member found the contraventions occurred. The residual Facebook ad invited the public to deal at an unregistered location, contravening s. 4(2)(b); DS, and through him the dealership, contravened s. 4(1)(b); and the undischarged lien should have been disclosed under paragraph 25 of the disclosure list in s. 42 of O. Reg. 333/08, because verifying and reporting a lien is the dealer’s responsibility even when the dealer believes the loan is paid.

But each finding came with the same qualifier: one instance is not a pattern. The ad was residual after the closure decision had already been made. The lien was a single unreported item on a loan that was actually paid off, and the 2024 inspection had found no lien issues. On the unregistered sale, the appellants argued from Hunter’s Square Developments that a rogue employee acting outside any agency relationship cannot bind the owner, and the Member agreed in substance: “I find that DS’s actions in that sale, which were unknown to Ninguem, are not predictive of Ninguem’s future behaviour” ([69]). Two long-standing trade customers, a wholesaler sending 8 to 10 vehicles a week and the operations manager of a high-end retail dealer, testified to Ninguem’s honesty; following Baxter, the Member weighed that whole history rather than the single incident. His overall assessment: “Ninguem’s conduct is that of someone trying to operate his business ethically, but who committed errors and omissions in reporting information on BOSs” ([70]).

The hearing also settled a procedural point. The appellants objected, citing Hodge, to the Registrar leading evidence beyond the allegations particularized in the revocation NOP, chiefly the unprovided letter of credit. The Member admitted the evidence, holding with the direction in Goldlist that he is “not bound by the four corners of the 2026 NOP”, and that the 2026 NOP expressly repeated and relied on the 2025 NOP’s allegations anyway ([16]).

The financial ground failed, and took the letter of credit with it

The Registrar’s second theory was financial: the HST debt plus the missing letter of credit showed the dealership could not be expected to be financially responsible under s. 6(1)(d)(i). Ninguem testified the dealership had negotiated a remittance plan, was being garnished by the CRA, and had paid the debt down to roughly $140,000 while continuing to meet payroll. The Member turned the Registrar’s own history against it: when the debt was $188,436.61 in 2025, the Registrar proposed conditions, not revocation, so a smaller debt could hardly justify the harsher remedy ([80] to [81]).

The order did not stop at declining revocation. Exercising the substitution power in s. 9(5), the Member directed the Registrar to remove conditions 8 through 12, the letter-of-credit terms, from the registration it had already carried out. The reasoning: “the Registrar has not demonstrated whether the LOC amount was determined because of the outstanding HST remittances, or because of the BOS omissions uncovered during the 2024 inspection” ([87]). If it was meant to offset the HST debt, it added debt-servicing costs that made financial responsibility harder, working against the very purpose of s. 6(1)(d)(i). If it was meant to answer the paperwork failures, nothing showed $25,000 was commensurate with that risk. The other 36 conditions, which the appellants had said they largely accepted, stay.

Where Olschewski saw the Tribunal refuse to add proposed conditions, this order subtracts existing ones. And where Maceka lost his registration over unregistered salespeople, the same species of contravention here survived revocation because it was isolated, unknown to the principal, and met with corrective action.

What to learn

• Every contravention finding stood; the appellants won anyway. What saved the registrations was the response: the location was already being closed, the vehicle was bought back, DS was terminated, and nothing suggested a repeat. Corrective action taken before the Registrar forces it is the difference between an incident and a pattern.
• An online ad is an invitation to deal. The s. 4(2)(b) finding rested entirely on a leftover Facebook Marketplace ad pointing at a location whose registration had lapsed. When a satellite site closes or a registration expires, scrubbing the ads is as important as locking the door.
• An unappealed NOP hardens into binding conditions. Vaughan Fine Touch let the 2025 NOP take effect under s. 9(4), then had to argue about its terms from inside a revocation fight. It escaped the letter of credit only because the Registrar could not explain what the $25,000 was calibrated to. The safer route is to appeal conditions within the 15-day window, when the Tribunal is looking at them fresh.