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A Western Canadian businessman who facilitated hundreds of millions of dollars in deals for Chinese investors to buy Canadian oilpatch assets is wanted on a Canada-wide arrest warrant after he failed to show up for court multiple times on tax-evasion charges stemming from some of those deals and from the Panama Papers leak.
A bench warrant was issued for Wentao Yang in Alberta provincial court in December, which was upgraded yesterday to a Canada-wide warrant in Alberta’s Court of King’s Bench.
The warrant, seen by CBC News, says it appears that Yang “is no longer a resident of Canada.”
He is facing nine charges laid by the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) in November, including four counts of filing a false or deceptive tax return, three counts of tax evasion and two counts of fraud.
Four of the charges allege he fudged his personal tax returns for 2015 and 2016 and failed to report commissions he earned on the business deals he teed up, while the rest of the charges relate to allegedly false tax returns he filed or assented to on behalf of a company called Kailas Energy Corp., where he worked as a director.
“The CRA alleges that Yang facilitated the acquisition of multiple Canadian oil and gas assets by investor groups in China. During the 2015 and 2016 taxation years, Yang failed to report consulting fees,” read a CRA news release published Tuesday afternoon.
“These transactions were done in such a way as to obscure the source of the funds by using several transfers, including through foreign bank accounts, before being deposited into Canadian accounts held by the accused.”
Yang did not immediately reply to a voice message and emails sent Tuesday afternoon.
1st known Panama Papers criminal investigation
He was the first person known to be targeted by the CRA when it launched criminal investigations into the Panama Papers, a huge 2016 leak of financial records from offshore tax havens.
Yang’s million-dollar Calgary home, a West Vancouver mansion he and his wife used, and their accountant’s office north of Toronto were searched by the CRA in 2018 as part of that investigation.
The CRA’s application to get a search warrant alleged that the Shanghai-born financier evaded more than $860,000 in income tax and GST on nearly $2.7 million in income he pocketed from brokering one of the biggest Chinese purchases in the oilpatch around that time.
At the time, Yang said in a statement to CBC News and the Toronto Star: “I am aware of certain allegations made against me reported in the media today. As a Canadian and a member of the community, I take these allegations very seriously and intend to address them in the fullness of time.”
CBC News checked back with him every year from 2019 to 2022 to see whether the CRA had charged him criminally or dropped its investigation, with Yang answering every time that he had no additional information to offer.
It was not immediately clear why the investigation took more than eight years.
Yang helped broker $770-million deal
The tax-evasion investigation into Yang stemmed from the Panama Papers, the huge leak of 11.7 million financial records revealed in April 2016 that exposed how some of the world’s richest and most powerful people use secretive offshore companies to hide their wealth.
The records were leaked to German journalists and shared with global media partners, including CBC in Canada, through the Washington-based International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ).
The ICIJ’s website is what first alerted the CRA to Yang’s offshore holdings, the tax agency says.
According to unproven allegations filed in court to get its search warrant, the CRA’s investigation determined that Yang held shares in or appeared to control a number of Caribbean corporations — one of which, called Marquee Financial Services Inc., was found to be registered in the Cayman Islands and played a key role in a huge oilpatch deal in 2016.
The $770-million deal, partly arranged by Yang, saw Chinese investors acquire struggling Calgary oil and gas producer Long Run Exploration.
Shortly after, according to the CRA’s allegations, the acquiring company transferred $11.5 million to Caymans-based Marquee Financial. Marquee then wired the equivalent of $2.7 million to two TD Bank accounts belonging to Yang in two transfers, one of which was labelled “consulting fees.”
But while Yang received the money, the CRA alleged, he never reported it as income on his 2016 tax return.
CBC’s own investigation found Yang was involved in a number of companies buying up resource assets in Western Canada.
They included Calgary-based Sequoia Resources Corp., which acquired thousands of gas wells in Alberta but filed for bankruptcy in March 2018, and Rockyview Resources Inc., which had stakes in oil and gas properties in B.C. and was proposing a liquefied natural gas terminal on Vancouver Island.
Records in the Panama Papers leak showed Yang was also a shareholder of British Virgin Islands-registered companies called Eastpride Capital Ltd., Sinoenergy Holding Ltd. and China Freeze-Dry Inc.
A previous leak of tax-haven financial data in 2013, called OffshoreLeaks, listed Yang as a director of four more British Virgin Islands companies: Airchn Holdings Ltd., Younglee Capital (Asia) Ltd., Young-Lee Financial Ltd. and Kailas Partners Ltd.
