Former Canuck facing nearly $3 million in fraud charges

Former Vancouver Canucks draft pick Prab Rai has had his assets frozen by a judge after allegations that he defrauded a Vancouver-based realtor out of nearly $3 million.

From The Province newspaper:

A B.C. judge has frozen the assets of a former Vancouver Canucks draft pick who is being sued over allegations he defrauded a realtor of more than $2.8 million.

Harpreet Singh Khela, the realtor, claims that Prab Rai, a fifth-round pick in the 2008 NHL draft, held himself out to be a successful and wealthy business person, purporting to have important connections with prominent local and international business people and retired hockey players.

He says that Rai provided to him phoney emails, financial statements, agreements and documents from those prominent business people and retired professional hockey players in order to fraudulently induce him to transfer more than $2.8 million for real estate developments and other investments.

Khela alleges that when he pushed Rai for details on investments that Rai came up with a "fantastical" story stating that he was robbed of all his online banking information and had been left penniless. 

More from The Province:

It was at this point that Khela began looking more closely at Rai's business ventures, prompting a lawsuit.

“Prab Rai’s stories to Khela about the profits earned by their business ventures were a lie,” says the lawsuit.

“Prab Rai told these false stories for the purpose of preventing Khela from commencing legal proceedings to trace and recover the funds that he advanced to Prab Rai.”

BC Supreme Court Justice Shelley Fitzpatrick has frozen Rai's assets ahead of the lawsuit, but noted that the only substantive assets in Rai's name are two Lamborghinis with a combined value of $1.2 million. In other words, the guy is a lying broke ass with two lambos... allegedly.

Rai, a Vancouver native, was somewhat of a hometown hero after being selected by the Canucks back in 2008 but he failed to ever play an NHL or even AHL game. He retired from pro hockey in 2015 after four seasons of being a regular healthy scratch in the ECHL.