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Lawyer accused of getting lover to kill hubby loses fight against trial

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TORONTO

The case sounds like one ripped from a movie script: A lawyer living in Greece is accused of getting his lover to kill his estranged husband back in Toronto so he can claim the $2 million in life insurance.

Almost six years later and no one has stood trial.

That will soon change after accused killer Demitry Papasotiriou-Lanteigne failed to stop his prosecution by claiming Ontario’s deputy attorney general has been biased against him since law school more than a decade before.

The story begins in March 2011 when U of T accounting clerk Allan Lanteigne, 49, was found beaten to death in the hallway of the Ossington Ave. home he shared with Papasotiriou-Lanteigne, his husband of almost seven years. Papasotiriou-Lanteigne was named as sole beneficiary in his spouse’s life insurance policy. Lanteigne did not have a will.

Always a person of interest, Papasotiriou-Lanteigne was arrested for first-degree murder 20 months later when he returned to Canada for court proceedings related to his claim for the life insurance payout. A few months later, Michael Ivezic was arrested in Greece on the same charge and extradited to Canada.

Toronto Police allege the men were having an affair and planned the murder together.

Yet Papasotiriou-Lanteigne nearly escaped a trial. Following a preliminary hearing in 2014, he was discharged after the judge found there wasn’t enough evidence to proceed. But in a rare move, the attorney general signed a preferred indictment reinstating the first-degree murder charge. He was arrested the following day.

In the latest twist, Papasotiriou-Lanteigne tried to quash the indictment by claiming Deputy Attorney General Patrick Monahan only signed it because he’s been biased against him since he was his professor at Osgoode Hall law school.

Papasotiriou-Lanteigne attended Osgoode from 2000 to 2003. He was at the centre of a firestorm in 2001 when he wrote an article for the law school newspaper, Obiter Dicta, that called Islamic law “oppressive, backwards and brutal.” His article was denounced as “racist and inflammatory” and the law school launched an investigation into whether he’d violated their code of conduct.

The controversy also spilled into the mainstream press with editorials written about freedom of speech. Papasotiriou-Lanteigne eventually wrote an apology that was posted on the school website.

During this period, the current deputy attorney general was a professor at Osgoode and Papasotiriou-Lanteigne contended that he was despised as a result of the campus controversy. In his second year of law school, the accused killer said he took a trusts course that Monahan often taught as a substitute for the dean and he was treated badly: Either the professor would ignore him or call him “Mr. Papa” and answer him with disdain.

In court filings, the deputy attorney general said he doesn’t remember Papasotiriou-Lanteigne. He never taught that course and as for the offensive article, Monahan didn’t remember it and wasn’t aware of the controversy. The court found “uncontradicted evidence” that the professor was on sabbatical at the time.

Papasotiriou-Lanteigne also claimed Monahan, who was by then associate dean of the law school, berated him at convocation in 2003 for being late and wearing a Hawaiian shirt and allegedly said that if it were up to him, he wouldn’t let him graduate at all after the article he’d written.

The court went back and looked at video from the ceremony and found Monahan was part of the platform party on stage and couldn’t have encountered Papasotiriou-Lanteigne as he described.

“There is a stark contrast between what the applicant says occurred at Osgoode Hall Law School over a decade ago and what the deputy attorney general says happened,” wrote Superior Court Justice Ian Nordheimer in refusing to quash the indictment.

“I conclude that the applicant has failed to establish any actual bias on the part of the deputy attorney general, nor do I believe that any rational informed observer would conclude that there would exist any reasonable apprehension of bias in these circumstances.”

His trial for first-degree murder will now proceed with a start date expected next year. In the meantime, the millions of dollars in life insurance remain frozen; if found guilty, Papasotiriou-Lanteigne is disqualified from collecting a cent.

mmandel@postmedia.com

 

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