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Emerson the elephant seal returns to Saanich

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Global News Hour at 6 BC: April 28

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A popular and beloved elephant seal has landed in Saanich, B.C., on Vancouver Island.

Two-year-old Emerson has made his way onto a beach in Saanich to moult, which means he will be grounded for roughly five weeks to shed his skin.

Fisheries and Oceans Canada is aware of his presence and warning community members to not get too close to the wild animal.

“I thought it was an April Fool’s joke,” said Paul Cottrell with Fisheries and Oceans Canada.

“We’ve seen him multiple times … we saw him last June and even in September. We’ve relocated him (before) because he is a big animal and now he is huge.”

It’s not a rare sight for Fisheries and Oceans officials to see elephant seals moulting in B.C. at this time of year, and in fact, it is becoming much more common, Cottrell said.

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“We’re getting more animals influx from further south. We get lots of moulting elephant seals every year and more of them every year,” he said.

“It really is a full-time job to keep them safe and the public safe.”

Fisheries and Oceans Canada has a B.C. seal team, which focuses on keeping interactions between seals and the public at a minimum.

“(There can be) issues with dogs off leash, small kids … if they get too close, they can get hurt,” Cottrell said.

“With Emerson, we are going to put up some fencing around him so he has a clear path to the water and people don’t get too close.”

The seal team will also be putting up signage and caution tape.

“We just want him to do his thing and move on but if we have to relocate him, we have the capacity,” Cottrell said.

5:03 Wildlife spring cleaning

Global News spoke with some community members who were watching Emerson closely.

“All the residents are so excited about the seal and I can’t believe how docile he is,“ Rahanna Vu said.

“As soon as I got on my break and I had to come see him down here.”

Of course, the celebrity seal is a favourite with kids in the community.

“Yesterday, I came here because my sister saw him. I came and stayed for an hour or two to watch him,” Preston Archibald said.

“He is very cute.”

Emerson’s personality is “welcoming,” according to Cottrell, because he was raised by volunteers in the U.S. after his mother left him at a park, but he still warns to give Emerson space so he can “do his thing.”

Clouds a concern as moon set to block the sun starting a little after 8 a.m. Oct. 14, Pacific time

Western British Columbia will be the best place in Canada to view a rare annular solar eclipse set to happen Saturday, but cloudy skies could obscure the phenomenon for many viewers.

An annular solar eclipse occurs when the moon passes between the Earth and sun, and because it happens when the sun is at its farthest point from Earth, viewers are treated to a bright halo surrounding the black blot of the moon.

Areas of North America that will see the total eclipse and fiery ring include a path from Oregon to Texas, but a statement from the University of British Columbia says Metro Vancouver residents will be able to see nearly 75 per cent of the eclipse beginning at 8:08 a.m. Pacific time.

The statement says the event will peak 72 minutes later when just a small sliver of the sun will be visible and the eclipse will end at about 10:38 a.m.

In part because of the potential for serious eye damage from looking directly at the sun, the University of British Columbia and Surrey-based Kwantlen Polytechnic University are holding viewing events and offering telescopes and special glasses so amateur astronomers can safely watch the eclipse.

But bad weather could complicate those plans, with Environment Canada calling for clouds and showers for much of the south coast on Saturday.

UBC will cancel its viewing party if clouds move in, but Kwantlen says its event will continue indoors with a livestream, although scientists at both universities are hoping for a break in the weather.

“A partial solar eclipse is one of nature’s great shows, and it’s free,” UBC physics and astronomy professor Douglas Scott says in the statement.

Laura Flinn, a physics instructor at Kwantlen Polytechnic, says the eclipse is an excellent way to spark a child’s interest in astronomy.

“This is an event that a large section of North America will be able to see,” Flinn says in a statement from KPU. “It’s a significant astronomical phenomenon that will give children a sense of how big the universe is.”

The last partial eclipse was visible across Metro Vancouver in August 2017, and Flinn says between two and five eclipses occur around the world each year, but only those along the path of an eclipse are able to see it.

The next complete annular eclipse over southern British Columbia won’t happen until Aug. 4, 2111, says Flinn.

Central and Eastern Canada won’t have long to wait for their peak at a solar eclipse.

The next one will happen on April 8, 2024, and will be viewable over parts of Ontario, Quebec, New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island and Newfoundland and Labrador.

Saanich, B.C., is looking to change parking requirement for new builds in an effort to increase green space and make housing more affordable.

Single-family homes, two-family dwellings, and attached housing in the district municipality — which is located just north of Victoria — are required to have a minimum of two parking spots per unit, while apartments require 1.5 spaces per unit.

Saanich council approved a motion Monday directing staff to work on an interim zoning bylaw amendment so new developments with fewer than 12 units will require a minimum of one stall per unit.

For new developments with more than 12 units, current minimums will switch to maximums. Apartment developments would be allowed at most 1.5 spots per unit.

Coun. Zac de Vries, who put forward the motion with Coun. Teale Phelps Bondaroff, described current parking requirements as "outdated," resulting in the loss of green space.

"When you require a development to build a certain amount of parking, they obviously need to make space for that," de Vries said.

He said council has received many applications for developments that do not meet minimum parking requirements, which have to go through a special approval process. Council often approves these requests, he said, so changing the requirements will result in streamlining the development process.

He says he hopes the change will create more affordable housing options.

"The more parking we build, the more expensive housing becomes," de Vries said. "This is an opportunity to make housing more affordable."

Luke Mari with Victoria-based Aryze Developments says current parking requirements are disconnected with the reality of car ownership.

"[Council is] really just getting in line with the demographic and culture shift away from car ownership," Mari said.

He said those who need parking can still choose housing with parking options. The new bylaw, he says, will allow developers to create buildings for people who live car-free.

An amended bylaw, he says, will allow developers to spend less time in council chambers and more time building housing.

"These new policies ... will definitely result in housing getting delivered quicker," Mari said.

De Vries says the interim policy change will be followed by substantial research to determine further steps.

It's been an international enigma for the last two years: Who really owns the lavish Vancouver Island estate where Prince Harry and Meghan wintered in 2020 as they reportedly hashed out their plan to step back from official royal duties?

Is it the Russian-born billionaire who several media outlets linked to the property? Is it Canadian mining magnate Frank Giustra, as (erroneously) reported by the New York Post's Page Six?

CBC and Radio-Canada found the answer, and it does indeed involve a Russian, but it wasn't easy — it took an international leak of tax-haven data, access to a company's internal records and intense research. All that, experts say, shows once again just how opaque Canada is when it comes to assets like real estate and who owns it.

"It is very easy for criminals around the world to be laundering their dirty money in Canada and buying real estate," said Kevin Comeau, a lawyer and financial transparency expert. "And we have no way of knowing who they are or [the] ability to chase their money. "

From B.C. to Caribbean to Channel Islands

There is no suggestion of criminality surrounding the Mille Fleurs mansion in North Saanich, about 30 kilometres up the island from Victoria. But it certainly shields its owner well.

For starters, unlike with most properties in B.C., you can't find it in the provincial land registry.

That's because the mansion isn't registered as a single property, but is part of a stretch of oceanfront land on the Saanich Peninsula owned by a corporation called the Towner Bay Country Club. Each homeowner on the land has shares in the country club corresponding to their lot.

The club's records are not public. But CBC/Radio-Canada was able to review an internal spreadsheet that tracks club owners' property tax. It lists a British Virgin Islands company called JEMC Management as the owner of Mille Fleurs.

Corporate records in the British Virgin Islands don't disclose a company's shareholders. So the ownership trail would normally stop cold here, but for a stroke of luck: The Pandora Papers — the huge cache of leaked tax-haven records obtained by the Washington-based International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, and shared with CBC/Radio-Canada — shows that JEMC Management is owned by another company, registered in the Bahamas, called Orland Properties.

Orland, in turn, is owned by a trust called the Andromeda Trust, formed under the laws of the Bailiwick of Jersey, a tiny tax haven off the coast of France. The trustee is a company whose sole officer lives in Cyprus.

But whose money is behind that?

The Andromeda connection

Two years ago, as speculation about who was really hosting Harry and Meghan hit fever pitch, a name that kept emerging was billionaire venture capitalist Yuri Milner, arguably the highest-profile Russian-born investor in Silicon Valley.

Milner is reported to spend time with celebrities on a superyacht — a boat also called Andromeda — and he knows Canadian music producer David Foster, whose wife knows Meghan Markle from their school days.

Foster, a 16-time Grammy winner, even gave an interview to Britain's Daily Mail about the mansion in 2020, where he said he's been friends with the mansion owner for years. The music producer said that, although Milner wasn't the owner, he had helped Milner rent the house "about five or six years ago… for a short time."

Milner-run investment funds took early positions in Facebook and Twitter before those companies went public, stakes that generated mega profits. But as journalists revealed in 2017, about half the capital for his firm's investments in Twitter came from VTB Bank, the No. 2 bank in Russia, which is majority-owned by the state.

"It's probably one of the two banks that fund most connected government officials and oligarchs," said Jamison Firestone, who practised business law in Moscow for nearly two decades and has become a leading figure in the global campaign against Russian state corruption. He called VTB "a slush fund" for the Russian government.

Milner's Facebook play, meanwhile, was partly seeded with money from a company that had itself obtained hundreds of millions of dollars in loans from a subsidiary of the Russian state energy company Gazprom, the same media investigation showed. An oligarch named Alisher Usmanov ran the Gazprom subsidiary and eventually obtained a stake in Milner's Facebook investment.

Milner has said he was just doing business, seeking funders and making investments. While VTB Bank and Gazprom are under sanctions in Canada, the U.S. and the EU, that didn't start until 2014 — three years after he raised the money.

A spokesperson for Milner told CBC that the VTB funding was paid back that year, and that Milner has not raised capital from Russian investors since 2011. Usmanov was only added to Canada's sanction list this March. Milner has never been sanctioned, and isn't generally considered to be an oligarch.

Milner's about-face

In early April, CBC asked Milner whether he directly or indirectly owns the estate where the royals spent Christmas and New Year's in 2019-2020.

The reply came from Alice McGillion of New York-based reputation management firm Rubenstein: "We can officially confirm, as we have consistently done [in] the past, that neither Yuri Milner nor any family member nor any entity affiliated with him or his family owns Mille Fleurs mansion on Vancouver Island or any other property in Canada." McGillion referred CBC to the interview given by music producer Foster.

However, documents found by CBC News in the Pandora Papers leak reveal that the Andromeda Trust — the Jersey-constituted entity atop the chain of offshore companies leading down to the Mille Fleurs property — didn't always go by that name.

Until February 2016, it was called the Yury Milner Trust (variations in the English spelling of Russian names are common).

A letter written by a lawyer for Milner in 2018, found in the leak, explains the trust's origins: "The person who contributed the assets," it says, "was Yury Milner."

The letter continues, "The potential beneficiaries of the Andromeda Trust include charities, relatives and friends of Yury Milner."

Another record says that before 2015, "Yury Milner exercised control over" a series of companies including JEMC Management, which bought the Mille Fleurs mansion.

CBC News went back to Milner with these findings. The response this time was quite different.

McGillion sent another statement, asking that it be attributed to an unnamed "trust spokesperson."

The statement admitted that Milner's trust, funded by him, bought the mansion in 2013. It acknowledged that, in fact, Milner himself was a beneficiary of the trust at the time. And it reiterated that Prince Harry and Meghan's stay was arranged by David Foster.

The statement explained this all by saying, however, that Milner and his wife decided in 2013 to pledge to give away the majority of their wealth to charity. The next year, Milner had himself removed as a beneficiary of the trust he'd created, in favour of newly formed charitable foundations that the statement didn't name. In 2018, all his relatives were also removed as possible beneficiaries, the statement adds.

He is therefore no longer "affiliated with" the mansion, the statement said.

It also confirmed that Milner has a similar trust arrangement for the 107-metre superyacht Andromeda — a vessel he has until now denied owning, but has a knack for being spotted partying and vacationing on. The statement said he is not "affiliated" with the yacht, either.

Firestone, the former Moscow lawyer, said it's a legal distinction without much of a difference.

"If you have the exclusive use of something, you basically have all the benefits of owning it without having to be legally owning it," he said. "So yes, he may not be the owner, but he may very well be the ultimate beneficiary, which is basically the same thing for all this stuff."

WATCH | CBC traces mansion's ownership

2 years ago

Duration 7:00

A CBC investigation traces the ownership of Mille Fleurs, a lavish Vancouver Island mansion where Meghan and Prince Harry wintered in 2020, revealing ties to Russian billionaire Yuri Milner and murky laws that experts say make Canada a target for money laundering.

'We don't have the tools right now'

The mystery of the Vancouver Island mansion shows how thorny it can be to find out who really owns property in Canada, which can make it immensely difficult to confront the scourge of money laundering in Canadian real estate, or to confiscate the riches of Russian oligarchs, transparency expert Comeau said.

"We don't have the tools right now in order to be finding, let alone seizing, those assets. You can't seize them until you identify them and connect them back to those Russian oligarchs."

In a Canadian first, B.C. enacted a public transparency database for property that's supposed to be fully operational in November.

Meanwhile, the federal and provincial governments have been in discussions since 2019 on setting up registries to track the real owners behind corporate entities like companies and partnerships. Justin Trudeau's Liberals originally promised it by 2025, but amid the fresh urgency of the unprecedented sanctions against Russia and a number of oligarchs, Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland promised in her budget speech last week to bump that up to 2023, at least for federally incorporated companies.

Responding to a question from Radio-Canada last week, Freeland said that while it will be difficult to also get every province to agree to adopt what's known as beneficial ownership transparency for provincially registered corporations, it is "really important" for democracy and the economy.

"My hope is that we are in a moment where there is a real national consensus," she said. "We need to know what money is flowing into assets in Canada."