Executive Summary: Key Legal and Evidentiary Issues

• Scope of the creditor’s right to obtain a seizure before judgment under article 518 C.p.c. based on alleged fraud and risk to recovery.
• Adequacy of the Philizot affidavit in establishing not only a prima facie claim against Christian Deschênes, but also specific facts showing maneuvers to put assets beyond the reach of creditors.
• Distinction drawn by the court between evidence of participation in, or benefit from, a fraud and evidence of concrete acts of dilapidation, concealment, transfer, or other steps to evade eventual judgment enforcement.
• Weight given to Deschênes’s sworn explanation that the bank transfers were rent payments under a commercial lease, and whether this rebutted the allegation that the 21 039 $ in transfers were “illicit” proceeds of the fraud.
• Application of the standard of “crainte objective” (objective fear) requiring serious, fact-based indications of evasive behavior, rather than mere allegations of dishonesty or heavy indebtedness.
• Evaluation, at the prima facie “véracité” stage, of whether the plaintiff met its burden on the balance of probabilities to justify maintaining a provisional, extraordinary remedy against Deschênes’s assets.

Facts of the case

Translatec Conseil limitée commenced an action on 13 December 2024 against its former general manager, Manon Robert, and a former employee, Christian Deschênes, seeking 944 483,58 $ in damages for an alleged fraudulent scheme said to have been carried out to Translatec’s detriment. The core allegations against Robert are that she diverted company funds through unauthorized cheques to herself, unauthorized bank transfers, and misuse of corporate credit cards. Deschênes, who is Robert’s son-in-law, was alleged to have participated in or at least known of this stratagem and to have benefited personally from diverted funds.
On the same day as the action was filed, Translatec obtained, ex parte, authorization from a Superior Court judge to seize before judgment the bank accounts and movable property of Robert, the bank account of Deschênes, his undivided interest in an immovable co-owned with his partner, Sandra Bonneville, and a trailer co-owned with Robert. The authorization was based on an affidavit sworn by Translatec’s president, Jack Philizot, supported by a preliminary forensic accounting review by MNP LLP.
After the seizures were carried out, Robert admitted having defrauded Translatec but claimed she acted without Deschênes’s knowledge. Translatec later amended its pleading to expand the allegations against Deschênes and to add Bonneville as a defendant, including pursuing further pre-judgment seizure and revendication remedies against her. The rectified judgment of 1 May 2025, however, deals only with the pre-judgment seizure of the assets of Deschênes, not with any separate seizure authorization against Bonneville.

The pre-judgment seizure and motion to annul

On 18 December 2024, Deschênes filed a motion to annul the seizure before judgment (Demande d’annulation de la saisie avant jugement), supported by his own sworn declaration. He attacked both the sufficiency and the truthfulness of the Philizot declaration that had been used to obtain the ex parte seizure order. The hearing on his motion was held on 14 April 2025.
The Philizot declaration alleged that Robert had implemented a fraudulent scheme (Stratagème frauduleux) that stripped Translatec of 944 483,58 $ and that, in that context, Deschênes had participated in the scheme and benefited from it. Specifically, Translatec alleged that: (i) Deschênes had been involved in the company’s accounting for about a year in support of Robert; (ii) he had “knowledge” of the fraudulent scheme because of that role; and (iii) he had personally received 22 “illicit” bank transfers from Translatec’s RBC account totaling 21 039 $, with no legitimate justification. Translatec also relied on an asset-search investigation indicating that Deschênes and Robert were heavily indebted and that their assets were limited.
Deschênes, in response, acknowledged that he had performed some tasks in the accounting software used by Translatec and that he had received the 21 039 $ in payments. However, he denied any involvement in, or knowledge of, the alleged fraud, and he insisted that he was not a person trained in accounting and did not participate in Translatec’s financial management. He portrayed his role as IT support only, explaining that he had limited access—largely for technical maintenance and year-end closing operations in the accounting software, and for generating payroll reports in the Ceridian system at Robert’s request.

Legal framework on seizure before judgment

The Superior Court began with the criteria for seizure before judgment under article 518 C.p.c. Translatec, as seizing creditor, had to show: first, the prima facie existence of its claim; and second, a serious, objectively founded fear that, without seizure, recovery of the claim would be in peril. The claim itself need not be liquidated or uncontested at this stage and is interpreted generously, but it must be more than merely hypothetical or eventual.
On the “crainte objective” element, the court emphasized appellate authority holding that the fear must rest on maneuvers by the debtor aimed at putting assets beyond the reach of a future judgment. A mere allegation of fraud is not enough; there must be specific facts showing dilapidation, concealment, liquidation, suspicious transfers to third parties or abroad, or other initiatives suggesting an intent to evade execution. Even persisting dishonesty does not, by itself, suffice, and financial difficulty alone—even where it puts recovery at risk—does not justify this extraordinary remedy. The court reiterated that pre-judgment seizure is not a punitive measure nor a device to guarantee the debtor’s solvency; it is reserved for situations where the evidence supports a concrete, fact-based fear of evasive asset maneuvers.

Existence of a prima facie claim against Deschênes

In assessing sufficiency, the court placed itself at the time seizure was authorized and, taking the Philizot allegations as true, evaluated their logical relationship to the statutory criteria. The judge concluded that the affidavit was sufficient to establish, prima facie, that Translatec had a non-hypothetical claim against Deschênes in extra-contractual liability. If Deschênes participated in, or knowingly benefited from, the fraudulent scheme, he could be jointly and severally (solidairement) liable along with Robert for the resulting loss, under the Civil Code regime of extracontractual fault and solidarity of co-tortfeasors.
This conclusion was not contested by Deschênes at the hearing: he accepted that if the allegations were taken at face value, they were capable of supporting a civil claim against him. Thus, the focus of the analysis shifted to the second criterion—whether there was a sufficient evidentiary foundation for an objective fear that, absent seizure, recovery would be in peril because of his own conduct vis-à-vis his assets.

Assessment of objective fear and sufficiency of allegations

The judge found that, even read generously, the Philizot declaration did not contain precise factual allegations of maneuvers by Deschênes designed to shield his assets from future enforcement. The affidavit tied the fear of non-recovery to three themes: the alleged participation of Deschênes in the fraudulent scheme; the benefit he supposedly derived from diverted funds (including the 21 039 $ in transfers); and his high level of indebtedness. However, none of these, even if true, showed concrete acts such as suspicious transfers of his own property, liquidation of assets, or concealment or dissipation aimed at avoiding a judgment.
The court reiterated that allegations of dishonesty or financial precariousness do not, by themselves, meet the threshold for an extraordinary remedy like seizure before judgment. The affidavit contained no allegation of any “incident, initiative or démarche” by Deschênes regarding his assets that could ground an objective fear that he was maneuvering to escape execution. In other words, while the affidavit might justify adding him as a defendant in the damages action, it did not justify freezing his property pre-judgment. On this ground alone, the court held that the authorization to seize his assets could not stand and that the seizure must be annulled as against him.

Examination of the truthfulness of key allegations

Although it was not strictly necessary to go further once insufficiency was found, the court also examined the prima facie truthfulness of the central allegations underpinning the claimed objective fear. At this stage, the parties could adduce evidence beyond the affidavits, and the court assessed whether Translatec had met its burden, on the balance of probabilities, to show that its key assertions were probably true.
On the alleged participation or knowledge of the fraudulent scheme, the court noted that Translatec’s theory was fragile. It rested almost entirely on the general claim that, for about a year, Deschênes had “assisted” Robert with the company’s accounting. Philizot did not have personal knowledge of the details and appeared mainly to be relaying what MNP staff reported following a discussion with Robert. By contrast, Deschênes’s own declaration explained in detail that he had no access to Translatec’s bank accounts, had no training in accounting, and only provided IT-type support: generating payroll reports from Ceridian, maintaining and year-end closing the Simple Comptable software, and having programming access to the FileMaker system without altering entered financial data.
The transcript of his examination out of court was reviewed by the judge, who found his explanations sufficiently precise and credible at the prima facie stage to undermine the probability that assisting with software necessarily equated to knowing participation in the fraudulent scheme or knowledge of it. Thus, even if participation in fraud could, in some circumstances, support a finding of objective fear, the evidentiary foundation for that participation here was too weak.

The disputed bank transfers and the alleged commercial lease

A central evidentiary point concerned the 22 bank transfers totaling 21 039 $ from Translatec’s RBC account to Deschênes, which Philizot characterized as “illicit” benefits from the fraudulent scheme. In his declaration, however, Deschênes admitted receiving the payments but maintained they were rent under a commercial lease with Translatec. He explained that Translatec had closed its former office space in March 2020 due to the pandemic and moved its activities to Robert’s residence, located in a property co-owned by Deschênes and Bonneville. According to him, for some time Translatec paid no rent for this occupation, even after the original office was sublet to another organization. At Robert’s request, he drafted a written lease in June 2022, under which Translatec agreed to pay a monthly rent of 1 000 $ starting in July 2022 in exchange for using part of the residential unit as office and server space. He asserted that the transfers at issue were payments of this contractual rent.
The court noted that the Philizot declaration itself confirmed that, following the onset of COVID-19, Translatec had permanently closed its offices, moved to remote work, and that Robert was performing her duties from her home in the building co-owned by Deschênes and Bonneville. This context made the existence of a lease, or at least a plausible arrangement for paying rent to the property co-owner, a realistic possibility.
Translatec, for its part, argued that several elements undermined the credibility of the alleged lease: it was signed by Robert, whose credibility was gravely compromised by her admission of fraud; the lease amount was not reflected in Translatec’s internal accounting; the leased “premises” were a room within an apartment already rented by Robert, leading to an appearance of double rent for the same space; the 1 000 $ monthly rent for half the apartment exceeded Robert’s own rent for the entire unit (around 750 $), which seemed commercially incongruous; and the rental income as declared by Deschênes in his tax returns did not cleanly distinguish between rent from Translatec and rent from Robert, and was even associated with an incorrect civic address.
The judge observed that these issues would ultimately be weighed by the trial judge on the merits, once a full evidentiary record was developed. At the limited prima facie stage of examining the truth of the allegations underlying the seizure, however, the existence of a written lease and the surrounding factual context were enough to render it plausible that the transfers could be rent payments rather than illicit diversions. That plausibility was sufficient to erode the probability that the payments were fraudulent benefits justifying a drastic pre-judgment seizure of Deschênes’s assets.

Outcome and implications

In conclusion, the Superior Court held that the seizure before judgment of Deschênes’s assets must be annulled. It found, first, that even taking the Philizot allegations as true, they were insufficient as a matter of law to establish that Deschênes was behaving in a way that objectively suggested he was maneuvering to shield his property from execution. Neither alleged participation in a fraud nor a difficult financial situation, without concrete evidence of evasive asset maneuvers, met the standard of “crainte objective” under article 518 C.p.c. Second, the court indicated that, even if the allegations had been sufficient on their face, Translatec had not, at the prima facie “véracité” stage, discharged its burden on the balance of probabilities to show that the central assertions about Deschênes’s knowing participation and illicit benefit were probably true in light of his detailed, corroborated explanations.
The court therefore granted the motion to annul, ordering the cancellation of the pre-judgment seizures registered against the immovable co-owned by Deschênes and Bonneville, as well as the seizure over Deschênes’s bank account at the Caisse populaire Desjardins Pierre-De Saurel, with costs in his favor. The judgment also included a caution to Deschênes, emphasizing that his conduct in relation to his personal assets is now “on the radar” of the court and that new facts could justify a renewed application for seizure before judgment. The successful party in this decision is thus defendant Christian Deschênes, and while he is awarded his legal costs on the motion, the judgment does not specify any exact monetary amount for those costs and does not award any part of the 944 483,58 $ in substantive damages at this stage, so the total amount ordered in his favor cannot be precisely determined based on this decision alone.