B.C. Lawyer Suspended After Handling $9 Million in ‘Suspicious’ Real-Estate Deals for Alleged Drug Traffickers

Photo illustration of Vancouver’s waterfront condo market.

BRITISH COLUMBIA – A Vancouver real-estate lawyer has been suspended for 16 weeks after mishandling roughly $9 million that moved through his trust account in a series of “suspicious” real-estate and private-loan transactions linked to two unidentified clients who were arrested in a Vancouver Police Department drug-trafficking investigation.

In a November 2025 consent agreement, the Law Society of British Columbia says Gary Lo acknowledged that, between December 2015 and June 2022, he worked on 12 files marked by unclear sources of funds and high-value transactions involving clients with “unknown occupations” and “a lack of discernible connections” between the parties and properties involved. Many of those files centred on two recurring clients — anonymized as AA and BB — whose property was already under civil-forfeiture action stemming from the VPD drug-trafficking investigation.

In May 2016, Vancouver police seized property from AA, BB and two others — including “two money counters and 15 cellphones” — and, by July 2016, B.C.’s Director of Civil Forfeiture had registered a security interest against them.

While the Law Society’s disciplinary document does not draw the line itself, the pattern of activity closely mirrors the money-laundering risks highlighted by the Cullen Commission, which found that organized crime groups – including Chinese transnational networks – used British Columbia’s real-estate market, casinos, law offices and even civil courts to move large volumes of suspicious funds, often through private loans secured against land titles.

The Law Society – which itself had standing in the Cullen Commission, as an entity whose members do not report to FINTRAC – does not refer to that broader backdrop. But the findings against Lo fit squarely within the fact patterns Cullen warned about.

Justice Cullen’s 2022 final report emphasized that lawyers’ trust accounts and private-lending arrangements pose significant money-laundering risks in British Columbia’s real-estate market. He found that lawyers routinely receive and disburse purchase funds and mortgage proceeds in trust, and they also structure private mortgages and loans that can be used to inject illicit cash into the formal property system.

This is Lo’s second major discipline case in recent years.