Ex-Bridging Co-Owner Gary NG Blasted by Judge Over AI Usage
One of the biggest financial scandals in Canadian history has taken a comic turn with former Bridging Finance co-owner Gary Ng being chastised for citing made-up precedents in court filings.
Ng was a key figure in the collapse of Bridging Finance. The “Bay Street whiz kid who wasn’t” became a part-owner of Bridging, he states, by “paying bribes” to now-convicted fraudsters David and Natasha Sharpe. Though many of the lawsuits surrounding the Bridging scandal have focused on the Sharpes, Ng’s role in the case highlighted major issues at the top of the Canadian finance industry.
Like the Sharpes, Ng is facing serious legal issues and lawsuits since, according to The Globe and Mail, literally fleeing his home after allegations were brought against him. This was followed by no-showing appointments mandated by investigators.
Though he has reemerged in the years since then, he finds himself fighting uphill battles in court. In the latest development in this case, the judge presiding over one of his cases gave him a dressing-down over filings that cited non-existent legal precedent.
Ng Allegedly Has a History of Forgery
One of the events that precipitated the fall of Bridging Finance and the convictions of David and Natasha Sharpe was the discovery of allegedly forged documents by Ng.
Ng’s “whiz kid” persona stemmed from his rapid-fire acquisitions of Canadian finance firms from 2018 to 2019. After founding Chippingham Financial Group in 2012, he purchased Rothenberg Capital Management and PI Financial in 2018, followed by purchasing a stake in Bridging Finance in 2019.
However, in 2020, he was alleged to have used falsified or forged documents to deceive lenders into giving him loans to make the purchase of PI Financial, per The Standard. This included “[creating] other fake account balances to use as collateral against C$172 million in loans.”
As a result, he has been banned from the Canadian finance industry for life and slapped with C$5 million in fines. Alongside this are criminal charges of fraud and money laundering. The criminal case against Ng is ongoing.
Piling onto all this are ongoing bankruptcy proceedings. Alleged attempts to stall these hearings led to Ng being harshly criticized by a judge.
Ng Cited Inaccurate Precedents in Bankruptcy Hearing
According to a report by The Globe and Mail, Ng cited inaccurate legal precedent in filings related to his bankruptcy case. This led to Ontario Superior Court of Justice in Bankruptcy and Insolvency associate justice Alexander Ilchenko lambasting Ng in a statement. The filing, Ilchenko, says “was in its totality improper, unnecessary, taken through negligence and in every possible way lengthened unnecessarily the duration of the proceeding.”
Ng reportedly admitted to using generative AI to fill out the filing, with Ilchenko saying that Ng “did not actually read the cases and paragraph references cited in his materials for the propositions he put forward, but relied on AI to do it for him.”
AI hallucinations are a real phenomenon, where LLMs inaccurately repackage scraped materials, re-scrape these inaccuracies, and give users false information as a result. Though there aren’t any claims that Ng knowingly or deliberately tried to sneak false precedents past the judge, this turn of events is absurd given his previous alleged use of falsified documentation.
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