https://www.lapresse.ca/actualites/...ret-a-payer-des-impots-mais-pas-trop.phpHells Angels: Cazzetta ready to pay taxes ... but not too much
The influential Hells Angel Salvatore Cazzetta and Revenu Quebec have been fighting for more than five years, which almost ended with an agreement, but which has just returned to square one.
Revenu Québec is claiming from the rider unpaid taxes on unreported income for the period from 1989 to 1996, so thirty years from this year.
During the 1990s, the RCMP investigated drug traffickers and concealers. With the help of a forensic accountant, she assessed the financial profile of the suspects.
Cazzetta was not arrested and charged in this case, but the vouchers showed that the total net worth spread was more than $ 840,000 during those five years during which the rider did not produce tax return.
At that time, Cazzetta was the leader of the Rock Machine, which was waging a bloody war on the Hells Angels. But the Rock Machine was fighting without their leader, since he was then detained in the United States for cocaine trafficking.
It was after his release and his return to Quebec that Cazzetta passed into the opposite camp of the Hells Angels in 2005.
After receiving Revenu Québec's notice for unpaid taxes, in 2014 Cazzetta filed a motion to institute proceedings to appeal the assessments to the Court of Québec, Civil Division.
The file then remained almost unchanged until 2017.
In that year, Cazzetta benefited from a nolle prosequi (stop of the judicial process) in a case of smuggling of cigarettes, so that he was able to recover a sum of $ 250,000 that the police had seized. .
The biker then instructed his lawyer to settle amicably this tax file that dragged on. After paying $ 50,000 in fees to his criminal lawyers, he told his civil lawyer that he was ready to go up to a maximum of $ 200,000 with Revenu Québec.
The two parties then began discussions and mutually offered each other offers and counter-offers. In September 2017, Revenu Québec submitted a proposal that Cazzetta's lawyer accepted, believing, after calculation, that the amount was within the maximum budget set by the rider, but did not provide a specific amount to Cazzetta.
However, Revenu Québec later indicated that under the agreement with his lawyer, Cazzetta was to pay him $ 394,000. The biker refused outright, claiming that his lawyer had never been mandated to accept such an amount.
"Not on the same radio frequency"
On January 15, Justice Éric Dufour of the Court of Quebec rejected an application by Revenu Québec, seeking to homologate the agreement, and allowed a request from Cazzetta to disavow his lawyer. As a result, the judge nullified the agreement between the two parties.
"The parties were not on the same radio frequency. The evidence shows that they do not have the same interpretation of the exchanges undertaken and held in good faith. "
"The tax expert at Cazzetta believed, in good faith, to have the mandate to accept the offer from Revenu Québec. The damage suffered by Cazzetta is obvious: pay back twice what he was willing to pay to settle the fate of notices of assessment, "writes the magistrate.
Cazzetta also filed a motion to declare the Attorney for Revenu Québec and a law firm disqualified, but it was dismissed by Judge Stéphane D'Avignon of the Court of Quebec. The case is currently at a standstill.
Salvatore Cazzetta sued the Attorney General of Quebec, the Director of Criminal and Penal Prosecutions of Quebec and the Sûreté du Québec because he considers that he was unfairly arrested and charged following Operation Mastiff, by which the Division des Produits de In November 2015, SQ crime dismantled a drug trafficking network operating in the Hochelaga-Maisonneuve sector of Montreal.
