China Investment Corp Tie to Gregor Robertson Council’s Condo Land-Swap Deal Was a “Clerical Error”: Why a Short-Seller Sees Old Vancouver Patterns in Carney’s Condo Bailout
ANALYSIS: “When You Go Bust, the List of Creditors Becomes Public”: Short-Seller Who Warned on FTX Says Carney’s Condo Bailout Fails the Honest-Deal Test
OTTAWA – In 2016, through a citizens’ lawsuit over a City of Vancouver land-swap deal with a private developer, records surfaced pointing to something stranger than fiction.
In Mayor Gregor Robertson’s City Hall, an independent review of the file — commissioned to answer the community’s victory in court — indicated that a Chinese state investment giant had an interest in the file. Reports on the controversial condo development could be provided to China Investment Corp, the sovereign fund managing Beijing’s foreign assets, under a formal clause written into the contract.
As it turned out, according to City of Vancouver lawyers, the reference to China Investment Corp was merely a clerical error — that was the city’s explanation at the time.
Not everyone at City Hall found the city’s explanation – China Investment Corp had zero connections to the condo development file – entirely convincing.
“I find it very curious,” George Affleck, then a sitting councillor, told Global News. “You would think that this document would have been vetted by several lawyers and senior staff.”
Affleck also commented on a Global News investigation that found the city had waived $1.5 million in construction fees for another major Vancouver developer — money returned to Robertson’s City Hall only after reporters asked.
As it turns out, that developer’s current chief of staff — a former senior operative in Gregor Robertson’s Vision Vancouver party who now chairs the federal Liberal Party in British Columbia — has been called as a witness by the Conservatives in their blocked bid for a bailout ethics inquiry, which centers on the February 2026 Mark Carney fundraiser attended by leading Vancouver developers.
Back in 2016, commenting on these clerical errors, Affleck pointed to a larger problem: “There is something broken at City Hall and we need to fix it.”
It is exactly this type of historical file that should continue to drive skepticism toward the Mark Carney–David Eby–Gregor Robertson Vancouver condo bailout, investor Marc Cohodes — the short-seller who exposed the selective-bailout logic at the heart of Sam Bankman-Fried’s crypto fraud — said in an interview with The Bureau.
Cohodes’s argument begins with a simple mechanical fact about failure.
“When you go bust, the list of creditors becomes public,” he said. For Mark Carney, B.C. Premier David Eby, and Robertson — formerly Vancouver’s mayor, now Carney’s Housing Minister — Cohodes said, “I think that is a problem.”
Receivership, in other words, is a disclosure machine.
If Pierre Poilievre’s contention that Carney “seems to have a bailout for anyone who’s part of the Liberal club of power brokers, corporate insiders and lobbyists” is borne out, the receivership path would be beneficial to Canadian taxpayers and young workers trying to enter Vancouver’s foreign-investment-shaped housing market — but would be a problem, as Cohodes puts it, for Mark Carney.
That problem was compounded by the witness list Conservatives sought at an ethics committee meeting this week, starting with “Condo King” marketer Bob Rennie, who held a fundraiser for Carney attended by prominent Vancouver developers — some connected to Robertson-era City Hall development files, and some holding inventory in the glut of unsold condos the bailout would address.
The Conservatives also called for Brookfield — the asset-management giant Carney chaired before entering politics — to be examined, with a Conservative MP telling the committee that a Brookfield affiliate had entered a commercial real-estate joint venture with a Vancouver developer that has numerous condo developments in Burnaby, a primary bailout glut zone. Conservative MP Gabriel Hardy noted that the joint venture was announced June 3 — 15 days before Carney announced the Vancouver condo bailout.
Here is how Cohodes, a legendary American investor and financial analyst, describes his theory.
A court officer takes the books, and the lenders, investors, and counterparties behind a distressed developer become part of the record.
A bailout that arrives before failure keeps every one of those files closed. To Cohodes, that is the unexplained oddity of the plan Ottawa and Victoria announced June 18 — a program to absorb more than 2,200 unsold condos from developers the governments have declined to name, at prices they have declined to state.
It is also, he said, what reminds him of FTX, the massive crypto-exchange fraud that sent founder Sam Bankman-Fried to prison.
What made Cohodes suspicious of Bankman-Fried was not simply the spectacular collapse of FTX, but the selective rescue of certain exposed actors before the market could reveal who was really at risk.
In Cohodes’s market logic, a legitimate rescue lets a distressed counterparty fail and then bids on the assets at the bottom, securing the better price. Bailing someone out before failure only makes sense, he argues, if something exists between the rescuer and the rescued.
Cohodes’s logic is applied here as a test, not an accusation.
If the condo program is genuinely for taxpayers and affordability, the value-maximizing play is obvious.
Let overexposed developers fail. Buy the assets in receivership at the lowest price. Backstop any exposed banks or B.C. credit unions that need liquidity support. Recycle the discount into homes young Canadians can actually afford, at prices reset toward British Columbia’s roughly $85,000 median household income.
There is another structural and historical piece of evidence that Canadian taxpayers should understand, which broadly points back in the direction of China — and toward some of the names the Conservatives requested to examine before Carney’s new majority on the ethics committee shut down the probe in a 5–4 vote.
The city’s troubled Olympic Village — a bailout that put taxpayers on the hook for some $740 million before it landed in receivership on Robertson’s watch in 2010 — was relaunched for sale the following year under Robertson’s council, with “Condo King” Bob Rennie brought in to market the unsold units.
As this writer reported in The Province in 2014, Rennie went on to organize an exclusive $25,000-a-seat lunch giving developers private access to Robertson, an arrangement that drew outrage as a case study in how real-estate money fills a governing party’s coffers.
Ultimately, the city, under Robertson, sold the Olympic Village’s final 67 condos to the Aquilini Group for $91 million, with Robertson declaring taxpayers had been delivered “gold.”
The details emerged only after a two-year freedom-of-information legal battle by Business in Vancouver. The city fought disclosure, and when the documents finally came out, they showed the transaction wasn’t quite what had been announced: roughly $20 million of the $91 million purchase price was not for the 67 unsold condos, but for the buyer’s acquisition of about $400 million in tax losses.
In a research paper, The Failed Experiment of Vancouver’s 2010 Olympic Village, Burnaby developer William McCarthy concluded taxpayers were left holding the bag.
Critics put the true taxpayer loss at $100–150 million against Robertson’s claimed $70 million surplus. The deal was lawful. But the point is what the public was told by Mayor Gregor Robertson to justify the transfer of unsold product to a Vancouver developer, versus what the documents later showed.
And here is the China thread, on the record: Francesco Aquilini told Business in Vancouver in 2011, when he first pursued the remaining Olympic Village bailout units, that the city’s asking price was high but he was confident he could sell the units to buyers from China. Offshore demand was explicitly part of the buyer’s stated calculus for moving high-priced Vancouver condo inventory.
There is a personal irony in Cohodes’s critique, because he says he heard the affordability case made best, years ago, by David Eby himself.
In their private conversations during Eby’s years as British Columbia’s leading voice against money laundering, Cohodes recalls, Eby shared concerns about some of the very figures the Conservative party has now enumerated as witnesses — and David Eby worried openly about China’s influence on Vancouver real estate.
Eby, he said, professed to support policy that would make housing answer to local incomes rather than offshore investors.
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