VANCOUVER — For weeks this winter, the company that operates a coal terminal in the Port of Vancouver believed it was paying millions to the contractor building its new potash export facility. Like many elderly victims across North America taken in by spoofed emails and phantom investment deals, Westshore Terminals had been scammed.
According to a sprawling file in the Supreme Court of British Columbia reviewed by The Bureau, Westshore alleges the $6.2 million was going instead to a numbered company registered at a PostNet store that rents mailboxes in Markham, Ontario. Company records list its director as Jiaying Liu, a person whose identity Westshore’s lawyers told the court they were still trying to establish.
The victim, a pillar of Canada’s resource export economy, is no ordinary company.
Westshore operates the largest coal-loading facility on the west coast of the Americas, shipping Canadian and American coal to steelmakers and power plants in Asia. It is also building a terminal, funded by BHP with an initial $1 billion, that will carry potash, the crop nutrient on which much of the world’s food supply depends, from the mining giant’s mine in Saskatchewan to overseas markets, due for completion in 2027.