Scotiabank, Re/Max have lot of explaining to do

Frantz St. Clair 

It appears that Scotiabank and Re/Max Realty are going to have to get their stories straight about a cheque for $9,000. CTV Toronto says tonight (Friday, December 9, 2014) that Frantz St. Fleur, a Toronto man of Haitian extraction tendered the condominium refund cheque for deposit at the branch where he had done business for ten years. Incredibly, the bank called the police. They took the man to 43 division and put him in a cell. Scotiabank’s story is that someone (not named) was told by Re/Max on the phone that the cheque was fraudulent. That is a story that Re/Max absolutely denies. Someone is definitely wrong and it is a big mistake. You can be forgetful, stupid or plain ignorant about a cheque but no employee of a bank or a realty firm like Re/Max has any business calling a cheque fraudulent until he knows it to a certainty. Mr. St. Fleur has sued both firms for $250,000. Unless one of them can get off the hook by proving it was not a party to the “fraudulent” story, it would seem the man is going to collect big time. And by the way, whatever happened to simply holding a cheque to verify it?    There is so much that does not add up. Someone trying to pass a phony cheque does not sit around for 20 minutes waiting for the police. Cops know stuff  like this. In his suit, Mr St. Fleur says he was racially profiled. He may have been, for whatever that means. It is even more astonishing to think that an employee of either of these firms would say or conclude out of some type of racial prejudice that the cheque was fraudulent.