On Oct. 5, 2015, Mingze Li was a 21 year-old student at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Business. Unlike most students at U of T, even business students, Li had just bought a property worth more than $1 million.
In December 2015, Li would buy another expensive property; this time he paid just shy of the $1-million mark, $995,000 for a red brick, three-storey semi-detached home on a leafy street in Toronto’s Cabbagetown.
Both properties were bought from different parts of the real estate portfolio controlled by Craig and Marc Kielburger and the charity and business complex they have built over the years. The first property at 212 Carlton St. was purchased from Kiel Projects Inc., one of the many companies set up over the years by the Kielburger brothers. The second was purchased from Free the Children, the charity now called WE.
WE is where Mingze Li’s father, Victor, works as chief financial officer.
Victor Li has worked closely with the Kileburger brothers for years looking after the money at WE and according to public real estate documents, Li and his family have done many deals with either the Kielburgers or one of the many WE affiliated organizations.
What is interesting about the purchases by Mingze Li is that 212 Carlton was purchased for $1.05 million with no mortgage recorded with the land registry office.
Unusual for a 21-year-old student. It is also unusual that both properties were purchased at significantly below what their municipally-assessed value would be pegged at on January 1, 2016 immediately after the sales.
Normally, homes sell above the assessed value which is mostly used as a factor when determining municipal tax bills.
It’s one of many reasons that several real estate professionals consulted for this story described these and other transactions as “odd” or “strange.”
One accountant, who was asked to review documents related to these and other sales, said questions do arise out of what is public but added more background documents would be required to know if these transactions were more than simply strange.
Another oddity in the Kielburger/WE real estate world is how often properties trade hands among family members and insiders. The home at 212 Carlton was sold by Mingze Li to Yutain Qi, another WE employee, and again it sold more than $250,000 below the assessed value.
The family has traded some pieces of real estate multiple times before transferring them to a numbered company for what is recorded as a $0 transaction.
Roxanne Joyal, CEO of ME to WE and also wife to Marc Kielburger, owned 1792 Lakeshore Blvd E., which overlooks Woodbine Beach, for seven years, starting in 2007.
She sold it to Victor Li and his wife in 2014 for $1.56 million. Li sold it to Fred and Theresa Kielburger in 2016 for $1.62 million.
In November 2018, the Kielburgers transferred the property to a numbered company owned by Kelly Hall-Holland, Craig Kielburger’s mother-in-law, for $0. The home is assessed at more than $1.7 million.
They did the same thing with 48 Meadowcliffe Dr. The home, which backs onto Lake Ontario at the Scarborough Bluffs, has traded four times among family members with the price going from $3.7 million to $0 to $800,000 to $0 again when transferred to a numbered company owned by Craig Kielburger’s brother-in-law, Stefan Fehr.
“We often see transfers from a mother to a son,” said one prominent realtor, describing how family transfers — even for low dollar amounts — are not uncommon, “but I’ve never seen anything like this in my 25 years in real estate.”
I did ask the Kielburger, Li and WE organizations to comment on this story and answer specific questions about the transactions. They initially said they needed 48 hours to provide a comment and described the questions of trading oddities as “technical in nature.”
The questions were not technical, nor overly complex, and definitely not as complex as the real estate world the Kielburger and Li families operate in. Through a spokesperson, the Kielburgers said that most of the real estate transactions have nothing to do with WE and are personal to their family.
While some may argue this is all their private business, the fact that much of their real estate often involves charities or business affiliated with those charities make this very much of interest to the public.
