14 DAY TRIAL // Canadian Gerald McGoey has been caught trying to fabricate a series of documents after investigators found that a number of papers dating back to 1995 were actually using fonts that became available more than 10 years later.
The story begins in December 2017 when McGoey’s company, Look Communications, went bankrupt and the Canadian was asked to pay $5.6 million to creditors.
All the available assets were thus supposed to be used for paying the debt, but according to McGoey, some of them actually belonged to his wife and three children. In other words, these assets, which mostly came down to houses, couldn’t be part of the bankruptcy filing because they had no connection to the company.
To prove his point, the Canadian presented a series of documents that were supposed to show the court that the homes, which he tried to protect from creditors, were held in trust by his family.
Old documents, new fonts
However, the court discovered that the documents were false because one of them was dated 1995, only that it used a Cambria, a Microsoft Office font that was designed in 2002 and released several years later. Another document was created in 2004 and used Calibri, the famous font that Microsoft included in Microsoft Office 2007 and in Windows Vista in 2007.
McGoey’s lawyer explains that his client may actually mistake the date when the documents were signed, so they could still be valid, but only have a different signing date.
“The McGoeys are simply mistaken about the dates the documents were signed but that the trusts could nevertheless still be valid,” the lawyer was quoted as saying by the National Post.
A similar case made the rounds last year as well, when a corruption case involving the country’s Prime Minister presented fraudulent documents allegedly created in 2006, but which used the Calibri font released a year later.