John Scotti Leasing: Holand takes the leases, and the estate is valued at nil

On November 13 and again on November 24, 2025, a firm called Datascan audited the vehicle portfolio of Location John Scotti inc. / John Scotti Leasing Inc. for Bank of Montreal. The company leased cars and trucks from an office on boulevard Des Sources in Pointe-Claire and specialized, the bank says, in luxury and exotic vehicles; that November it reported 853 of them, among them 194 Lamborghinis, 22 Ferraris, 17 Rolls-Royces and a Bugatti. BMO financed the fleet one vehicle at a time, each loan repayable within 30 days after the lease ended or as soon as the vehicle was sold. According to the bank's application for a receiver, the audit showed that 80 financed vehicles had been sold, 29 of them to the new-car dealer John Scotti Automotive Ltd., without the bank being told and without the proceeds going to the loans. Seventy-seven of those loans were still unpaid when the bank applied, for a total of $13,272,327.60, per the Receivership Application, Mar. 30, 2026, paras. 6–7, 11–16, 22–23.

Four months after the Superior Court of Québec appointed Restructuration Deloitte inc. as receiver, Justice Karen M. Rogers approved the sale of 367 of the company's vehicles, subject to adjustment and with their leases, to Holand Leasing (1995) Ltd., per the Receiver's First Report, July 24, 2026, paras. 72, 75. She signed the approval and vesting order on July 29, 2026, and the receiver certified the closing at 3:45 p.m. on July 31, per the Approval and Vesting Order, July 29, 2026, paras. 7, 13 and the Certificate of the Receiver, July 31, 2026, p. 3. The price is redacted in the public filings. On August 14 the receiver assigned the company into bankruptcy, and Deloitte, now trustee as well, reports that the estimated realizable value of the assets in the bankruptcy is nil, that no dividend is anticipated, and that it will not examine pre-bankruptcy transactions under ss. 95 to 101 of the Bankruptcy and Insolvency Act, per the Trustee's Preliminary Report, Sept. 2, 2026, pp. 2–4.

The bank's account

No affidavit from the company is in the record; the receivership order recites "the absence of any opposition," per the Order Appointing a Receiver, Apr. 1, 2026, para. 2. The account of how the business came to this point belongs to the bank. Under a 2022 letter agreement guaranteed by Les Immeubles P. Scotti inc., BMO provided a $500,000 operating line and a revolving leasing facility first authorized at $130,000,000 and later set at $100,000,000, secured by movable hypothecs of 2019 and 2021 over the universality of the company's movable property and by s. 427 Bank Act security. On March 26, 2026 the debt stood at $90,981,375.72: $77,130,101.59 on the leasing facility and $13,851,274.13 on the operating line, $13,351,274.13 of it above the limit, per the Receivership Application, Mar. 30, 2026, paras. 10, 18–20, 49.

The defaults the bank lists include audited statements not delivered for the years ended September 30, 2024 and 2025; a shortfall on sold vehicles of about $14,700,000 by December 31, 2025; and a reduction of about $8,300,000, between June and December 2025, in what the company owed John Scotti Automotive through intercompany accounts, which the bank says the letter agreement's bar on repaying subordinated debt did not allow. In February 2026, the application says, rents of about $923,000 came in against a monthly payment of $1,683,700.03 due to BMO on the leasing facility, before operating expenses. The audit and Deloitte's preliminary findings as the bank's financial adviser also counted 87 vehicles on the lessor's books registered with the SAAQ to John Scotti Automotive, 45 registered to third parties, and 56 that left the portfolio in December 2025 in transactions that remain, for many, unexplained, per the Receivership Application, Mar. 30, 2026, paras. 24–28.

Under the heading [translation] "other concerning matters," the application describes a 2021 Bugatti Chiron the company bought from PTC Automotive Ltd. / Grand Touring Automobiles on September 14, 2024 for $5,800,000 plus taxes and leased to PTC Automotive days later. BMO could not renew the loan at maturity for deficient documentation, the lease was renewed anyway, and the car had at various times been registered in Ontario to a Québec company dissolved in 2011 and in Québec to John Scotti Automotive; the company told the bank it could not sell it for lack of adequate information about it, per the Receivership Application, Mar. 30, 2026, para. 40.

On February 25, 2026, BMO served its s. 244 notice and a prior notice of the exercise of a hypothecary right. On April 1, Registrar Vincent-Michel Aubé appointed Deloitte receiver of all the company's property, with a $500,000 administration charge ranking first and a $600,000 charge securing up to $500,000 of interim financing from BMO. The order also directs registration authorities to correct the registration of any vehicle the receiver shows to be the company's though registered to someone else, absent notice of a competing ownership claim, per the Order Appointing a Receiver, Apr. 1, 2026, paras. 4, 9, 17, 35, 37–39.

A lessor without a dealer's permit

Deloitte took over more than 850 vehicles, more than 670 under active leases, with lessees mainly in Québec and Ontario and others in other provinces. It laid off all but three employees and fielded requests to renew, buy out or return vehicles across lessee files that "number in the hundreds" [translation], per the Receiver's First Report, July 24, 2026, paras. 13–14, 18–19, 27.

On or about May 15, the receiver learned that dealer's permit number 70823, printed on the company's leases and sale contracts, belonged to John Scotti Automotive, and that the lessor had never held a road-vehicle dealer's permit from the Office de la protection du consommateur. Trading without a required permit exposes a corporation to a fine of up to $175,000 under the Consumer Protection Act, and the uncertainty kept the receiver from acting on requests to sell while 189 bank-financed leases came due between March 26 and July 31. The OPC, served with the receiver's motion for directions on May 22, sent no one to the June 2 hearing, per the Judgment on Motion for Directions, June 4, 2026, paras. 1–3, 10–13, 19, 22–24.

On June 4, Justice Michel A. Pinsonnault declared that the receiver may sell the company's vehicles without a dealer's permit under s. 321 of the Act and without the used-car label under s. 155. No vehicle had been acquired and no lease signed since the appointment, so the insolvent company was no longer a merchant acquiring vehicles to trade in them; neither it nor the receiver could obtain a permit now, given the OPC president's discretion to refuse an applicant whose finances cannot bear the trade's obligations and a municipal attestation that an office with no vehicle storage would struggle to get. "The Receiver is carrying out an orderly realization of LJS's assets, as opposed to carrying on the business of a road-vehicle dealer," he wrote [translation]. He was not convinced the two statutes conflicted, but agreed that a discretionary provincial permit regime cannot confer a veto over a core federal activity, and held that the Act's usual protections for buyers "are replaced, in this case, by disclosure to purchasers of the risk inherent in any purchase made in an insolvency context" [translation], per the Judgment on Motion for Directions, June 4, 2026, paras. 45–46, 51–56, 59, 62, 67–68, 79, 87–88.