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Payl Cyr Case Gets New Twist
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Greg Carr
May 9, 2013, 6:55:27 AM5/9/13
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A B.C. man who vanished a decade ago in a possible underworld killing
set up offshore companies and bank accounts before he went missing,
and is among the 450 Canadians named in the recent massive leak of tax-
haven data.
MAPCanada's offshore account-holders
Greg Cyr's ex-wife is now asking police to take a new look at his
disappearance, after CBC News showed her secret financial documents
found amid the leaked files.
Cyr, a 40-year-old drywaller, disappeared in 2003 after heading to a
meeting in Vancouver with what police later told Miriam Byrne were her
former husband's "underworld connections."
"What's frustrating for me is it took years … years to put a picture
together," Byrne said after looking at some of the records. The files
were part of an unprecedented leak of financial data obtained by the
Washington-based International Consortium of Investigative Journalists
and shared with the CBC and other global media outlets.
"If we would have had this..." Byrne said, pausing. "I'm speechless."
How CBC obtained the documents
The documents show that the year before Cyr disappeared, he set up two
companies through a firm called TrustNet, which provides offshore
services in the Cook Islands, a South Pacific tax haven.
Cyr used one of his companies, Sentinel Holdings, to buy a $1.5-
million property on Beach Drive in Victoria. The area is an exclusive
waterfront neighbourhood adjoining the Royal Victoria Yacht Club and
Victoria Golf Club. But Cyr kept his ownership of the house a secret
from his ex-wife, even as he did construction work on it.
"I thought it was his employer's," she said.
Devoted dad
By then, Byrne and Cyr were divorced, with a five-year-old son.
Byrne said their marriage ended after Cyr confessed he had shipped
some marijuana from British Columbia to Whitehorse.
Cyr eventually convinced her he had straightened out, Byrne said, and
he was gradually permitted more time with their son.
Cyr once told his ex-wife that 'the one thing I've done right in my
life is be a dad,' she said. (Courtesy of Miriam Byrne)
As a drywaller, he'd be up at dawn to head to job sites. Later, he ran
a tile and wood import business. He became a devoted father who doted
on their son.
"I remember him on the phone saying to me, 'Miriam, the one thing I've
done right in my life is be a dad,'" Byrne recalled.
Their son cherished his father's visits. "Greg would ring the
doorbell, our son would run up and next thing you know, all they did
was roll around and wrestle," Byrne said.
So it came as a shock one day in October 2003 when Cyr failed to pick
their boy up from school. He has never been heard from since.
Byrne later applied to the B.C. Supreme Court to have Cyr declared
dead, so she could claim a life insurance payout for their son.
The judge heard evidence that as a youth, Cyr sold drugs and
associated with the Hells Angels, and that Vancouver police had told
Byrne her ex-husband was murdered by associates.
Cyr's girlfriend at the time described him in an affidavit as
"frightened … like a child about to be left alone" on the day he went
to the meeting from which he never returned.
If you have more information on this story, or other investigative
tips to pass on, please email investi...@cbc.ca
But Judge Malcolm Macaulay rejected Byrne's bid, finding it was
equally likely that Cyr earned money through the illegal drug trade,
had sizable hidden assets and was motivated to disappear.
Cyr had fled before. Born Brent Thurston, he ran from a charge of
narcotics possession in Manitoba in 1988. A warrant was issued for his
arrest. Cyr eventually moved to Yukon and changed his name. The
warrant is still outstanding.
It was a history Cyr kept mainly hidden from Byrne until after they
were married. But she never believed he could do it again.
"He would have had our son not feel like he'd lost biggest most
important thing in his life," Byrne said. "He wouldn't do that"
TrustNet stonewalls
Armed with that conviction, Byrne appealed to TrustNet for answers.
She had obtained a duffle bag of documents linking Cyr to the offshore-
services firm from his girlfriend. And in January 2004, three months
after Cyr vanished, Byrne picked up the phone and called the company
in the Cook Islands.
"I remember it like it was yesterday. I remember my heart racing and
sitting at my desk and trying to be very professional and not
emotional," she said.
Read the note in Greg Cyr's offshore account about how his ex-wife
called asking after him.
"At that point we just wanted to get any clue as to where he might
have gone, what might have happened. Something."
A record of that call is among the documents obtained by CBC News.
"Miriam Byrne called," TrustNet employee Amanda Keu wrote in a memo in
Cyr's offshore account.
Keu noted that Byrne "appeared to be very distressed and was crying"
about her missing ex-husband, who she believed was dead
"She just wanted to know if he was alive," Keu wrote.
But Keu clung to the Cook Islands' strict financial-secrecy laws and
refused to acknowledge anything about Cyr. After hanging up, TrustNet
employees tried to reach Cyr by phone and email. There is no record he
ever responded.
"I remember just thinking, 'Can someone just tell me something?'"
Byrne recounted.
Byrne says the files about her ex-husband, documents discovered amid a
massive trove of offshore financial records, point to the need for
police to interview more people in the Cyr case. (CBC)
TrustNet continued to stonewall inquiries about Cyr four months later
when a receiver in B.C. faxed and called with a court order empowering
him to act on Cyr's behalf. The employee who responded said TrustNet
"did not recognize foreign judgments."
Privately, though, the firm eventually started having concerns. Seven
months after its client went missing, the company filed a report with
the Cook Islands Financial Intelligence Unit, indicating Cyr might
have been involved in criminal transactions or money laundering.
But TrustNet continued to frustrate the B.C. receiver. A TrustNet
employee told him that "unless he was a shareholder or office holder
of the company, we could not divulge any information" about the
"structure of business affairs of the company".
Secrecy for sale
In contrast, Cyr met with very little scrutiny when setting up his
companies and their bank accounts.
TrustNet asked him to provide details about his business, and Cyr
wrote that the purpose of Sentinel Holdings was "financing other
companies and business ventures," and that the source of his funds was
an import-export business.
BUYING SECRECYInteractive: How offshore havens attract the wealthy
Cyr also had to provide a bank reference, which amounted to a form
letter from his local branch of TD Canada Trust vouching for the fact
that Cyr had a chequing account.
The annual fee for maintaining his offshore company was about $1,500.
For that price, Cyr got secrecy. A note on his file makes it clear
that "the owner, Mr. Cyr, does not want his name revealed as the
beneficial owner of the company."
"It was strictly superficial," money-laundering investigator Gary
Clement said about TrustNet's due diligence in vetting Cyr as a
client.
TrustNet set up offshore account for senator's husband
CBC News showed the Cyr files to Clement, who spent 30 years with the
RCMP and now manages an international financial consulting firm in
Ontario.
"It really enabled people like Mr. Cyr to set up businesses, set up a
number of accounts using different companies without really
establishing his bona fides. And that really is the case here,"
Clement said.
Still listed as missing person
TrustNet eventually complied with the court order in Cyr's case and
revealed his assets, which didn't amount to much more than the house
in Victoria.
Byrne's lawyer, Greg Harney, said he doesn't fault TrustNet for
withholding information about its clients, if all that exists are
suspicions of criminality.
Cyr "was a businessman, and there were perhaps issues, and none of
them were ultimately confirmed by anybody, including the police,"
Harney said.
The Vancouver Police Department still lists Cyr as missing person on
its website, even though in 2010 Harney was successful in getting the
B.C. Supreme Court to declare Cyr dead.
Robert Chernochan's name appears in Cyr's offshore records. Chernochan
was arrested in September in California and is charged with drug
trafficking. ((Tehama County Sheriff's Department))
The department declined to discuss the case, but Harney thinks
investigators might be interested in a discovery CBC News made after
examining the leaked TrustNet files.
Those documents show Cyr shared details about his secret company with
a friend, Robert Chernochan. Cyr authorized Chernochan, who was a real
estate agent at the time, to handle details connected with the
Victoria house he bought.
Last September, Chernochan was arrested in California at a truck
inspection station. He was driving a tractor-trailer north to Canada.
Highway patrol officers found 66 kilograms of cocaine in a hidden
compartment.
Chernochan is now in jail on narcotics trafficking charges, held on $5-
million US bail. Neither he nor his lawyer responded to requests for
interviews.
Clement said Chernochan is someone police should talk to.
"If I was still in law enforcement and this was my case, I definitely
would make that overture to the authorities in the United States to
see if we could get co-operation."
Byrne said she recalls police telling her 10 years ago that they had
tried to speak to Chernochan as part of the investigation into Cyr's
disappearance, but he proved elusive. She had no idea at the time
about TrustNet, the offshore accounts it set up and Chernochan's role
in them.
"If I had this," Byrne said, "I would have marched this down to the
police to say please, please ... please interview them."
If you have more information on this story, or other investigative
tips to pass on, please email investi...@cbc.ca
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/story/2013/05/07/bc-greg-cyr-offshore.html
has a pic of the missing /presumed dead man.
set up offshore companies and bank accounts before he went missing,
and is among the 450 Canadians named in the recent massive leak of tax-
haven data.
MAPCanada's offshore account-holders
Greg Cyr's ex-wife is now asking police to take a new look at his
disappearance, after CBC News showed her secret financial documents
found amid the leaked files.
Cyr, a 40-year-old drywaller, disappeared in 2003 after heading to a
meeting in Vancouver with what police later told Miriam Byrne were her
former husband's "underworld connections."
"What's frustrating for me is it took years … years to put a picture
together," Byrne said after looking at some of the records. The files
were part of an unprecedented leak of financial data obtained by the
Washington-based International Consortium of Investigative Journalists
and shared with the CBC and other global media outlets.
"If we would have had this..." Byrne said, pausing. "I'm speechless."
How CBC obtained the documents
The documents show that the year before Cyr disappeared, he set up two
companies through a firm called TrustNet, which provides offshore
services in the Cook Islands, a South Pacific tax haven.
Cyr used one of his companies, Sentinel Holdings, to buy a $1.5-
million property on Beach Drive in Victoria. The area is an exclusive
waterfront neighbourhood adjoining the Royal Victoria Yacht Club and
Victoria Golf Club. But Cyr kept his ownership of the house a secret
from his ex-wife, even as he did construction work on it.
"I thought it was his employer's," she said.
Devoted dad
By then, Byrne and Cyr were divorced, with a five-year-old son.
Byrne said their marriage ended after Cyr confessed he had shipped
some marijuana from British Columbia to Whitehorse.
Cyr eventually convinced her he had straightened out, Byrne said, and
he was gradually permitted more time with their son.
Cyr once told his ex-wife that 'the one thing I've done right in my
life is be a dad,' she said. (Courtesy of Miriam Byrne)
As a drywaller, he'd be up at dawn to head to job sites. Later, he ran
a tile and wood import business. He became a devoted father who doted
on their son.
"I remember him on the phone saying to me, 'Miriam, the one thing I've
done right in my life is be a dad,'" Byrne recalled.
Their son cherished his father's visits. "Greg would ring the
doorbell, our son would run up and next thing you know, all they did
was roll around and wrestle," Byrne said.
So it came as a shock one day in October 2003 when Cyr failed to pick
their boy up from school. He has never been heard from since.
Byrne later applied to the B.C. Supreme Court to have Cyr declared
dead, so she could claim a life insurance payout for their son.
The judge heard evidence that as a youth, Cyr sold drugs and
associated with the Hells Angels, and that Vancouver police had told
Byrne her ex-husband was murdered by associates.
Cyr's girlfriend at the time described him in an affidavit as
"frightened … like a child about to be left alone" on the day he went
to the meeting from which he never returned.
If you have more information on this story, or other investigative
tips to pass on, please email investi...@cbc.ca
But Judge Malcolm Macaulay rejected Byrne's bid, finding it was
equally likely that Cyr earned money through the illegal drug trade,
had sizable hidden assets and was motivated to disappear.
Cyr had fled before. Born Brent Thurston, he ran from a charge of
narcotics possession in Manitoba in 1988. A warrant was issued for his
arrest. Cyr eventually moved to Yukon and changed his name. The
warrant is still outstanding.
It was a history Cyr kept mainly hidden from Byrne until after they
were married. But she never believed he could do it again.
"He would have had our son not feel like he'd lost biggest most
important thing in his life," Byrne said. "He wouldn't do that"
TrustNet stonewalls
Armed with that conviction, Byrne appealed to TrustNet for answers.
She had obtained a duffle bag of documents linking Cyr to the offshore-
services firm from his girlfriend. And in January 2004, three months
after Cyr vanished, Byrne picked up the phone and called the company
in the Cook Islands.
"I remember it like it was yesterday. I remember my heart racing and
sitting at my desk and trying to be very professional and not
emotional," she said.
Read the note in Greg Cyr's offshore account about how his ex-wife
called asking after him.
"At that point we just wanted to get any clue as to where he might
have gone, what might have happened. Something."
A record of that call is among the documents obtained by CBC News.
"Miriam Byrne called," TrustNet employee Amanda Keu wrote in a memo in
Cyr's offshore account.
Keu noted that Byrne "appeared to be very distressed and was crying"
about her missing ex-husband, who she believed was dead
"She just wanted to know if he was alive," Keu wrote.
But Keu clung to the Cook Islands' strict financial-secrecy laws and
refused to acknowledge anything about Cyr. After hanging up, TrustNet
employees tried to reach Cyr by phone and email. There is no record he
ever responded.
"I remember just thinking, 'Can someone just tell me something?'"
Byrne recounted.
Byrne says the files about her ex-husband, documents discovered amid a
massive trove of offshore financial records, point to the need for
police to interview more people in the Cyr case. (CBC)
TrustNet continued to stonewall inquiries about Cyr four months later
when a receiver in B.C. faxed and called with a court order empowering
him to act on Cyr's behalf. The employee who responded said TrustNet
"did not recognize foreign judgments."
Privately, though, the firm eventually started having concerns. Seven
months after its client went missing, the company filed a report with
the Cook Islands Financial Intelligence Unit, indicating Cyr might
have been involved in criminal transactions or money laundering.
But TrustNet continued to frustrate the B.C. receiver. A TrustNet
employee told him that "unless he was a shareholder or office holder
of the company, we could not divulge any information" about the
"structure of business affairs of the company".
Secrecy for sale
In contrast, Cyr met with very little scrutiny when setting up his
companies and their bank accounts.
TrustNet asked him to provide details about his business, and Cyr
wrote that the purpose of Sentinel Holdings was "financing other
companies and business ventures," and that the source of his funds was
an import-export business.
BUYING SECRECYInteractive: How offshore havens attract the wealthy
Cyr also had to provide a bank reference, which amounted to a form
letter from his local branch of TD Canada Trust vouching for the fact
that Cyr had a chequing account.
The annual fee for maintaining his offshore company was about $1,500.
For that price, Cyr got secrecy. A note on his file makes it clear
that "the owner, Mr. Cyr, does not want his name revealed as the
beneficial owner of the company."
"It was strictly superficial," money-laundering investigator Gary
Clement said about TrustNet's due diligence in vetting Cyr as a
client.
TrustNet set up offshore account for senator's husband
CBC News showed the Cyr files to Clement, who spent 30 years with the
RCMP and now manages an international financial consulting firm in
Ontario.
"It really enabled people like Mr. Cyr to set up businesses, set up a
number of accounts using different companies without really
establishing his bona fides. And that really is the case here,"
Clement said.
Still listed as missing person
TrustNet eventually complied with the court order in Cyr's case and
revealed his assets, which didn't amount to much more than the house
in Victoria.
Byrne's lawyer, Greg Harney, said he doesn't fault TrustNet for
withholding information about its clients, if all that exists are
suspicions of criminality.
Cyr "was a businessman, and there were perhaps issues, and none of
them were ultimately confirmed by anybody, including the police,"
Harney said.
The Vancouver Police Department still lists Cyr as missing person on
its website, even though in 2010 Harney was successful in getting the
B.C. Supreme Court to declare Cyr dead.
Robert Chernochan's name appears in Cyr's offshore records. Chernochan
was arrested in September in California and is charged with drug
trafficking. ((Tehama County Sheriff's Department))
The department declined to discuss the case, but Harney thinks
investigators might be interested in a discovery CBC News made after
examining the leaked TrustNet files.
Those documents show Cyr shared details about his secret company with
a friend, Robert Chernochan. Cyr authorized Chernochan, who was a real
estate agent at the time, to handle details connected with the
Victoria house he bought.
Last September, Chernochan was arrested in California at a truck
inspection station. He was driving a tractor-trailer north to Canada.
Highway patrol officers found 66 kilograms of cocaine in a hidden
compartment.
Chernochan is now in jail on narcotics trafficking charges, held on $5-
million US bail. Neither he nor his lawyer responded to requests for
interviews.
Clement said Chernochan is someone police should talk to.
"If I was still in law enforcement and this was my case, I definitely
would make that overture to the authorities in the United States to
see if we could get co-operation."
Byrne said she recalls police telling her 10 years ago that they had
tried to speak to Chernochan as part of the investigation into Cyr's
disappearance, but he proved elusive. She had no idea at the time
about TrustNet, the offshore accounts it set up and Chernochan's role
in them.
"If I had this," Byrne said, "I would have marched this down to the
police to say please, please ... please interview them."
If you have more information on this story, or other investigative
tips to pass on, please email investi...@cbc.ca
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/story/2013/05/07/bc-greg-cyr-offshore.html
has a pic of the missing /presumed dead man.
Greg Carr
May 10, 2013, 12:15:29 AM5/10/13
to
>
> http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/story/2013/05/07/bc-gr...
> has a pic of the missing /presumed dead man.
https://groups.google.com/group/alt.true-crime/browse_thread/thread/c6ff8966f3387418/68e833c19406056e?lnk=raot&hl=en
has more info.
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