When a Trusted Attorney Started Spending Someone Else's Money

The situation

Grace was 74, a semi-retired physiotherapist in Kingston who had spent three decades treating patients recovering from surgery and injury. She had built a comfortable estate worth somewhere between $1.2 million and $2.5 million, mostly in her home, a modest investment portfolio, and savings accumulated over a long career. Grace had two adult children from two different relationships: Chidi, her son from her first marriage, and Ngozi, her daughter from her second, a software developer who lived nearby and visited most weekends.

Several years earlier, after a health scare, Grace had signed a power of attorney for property naming Chidi as her attorney. A power of attorney for property is a legal document that lets someone else manage your finances and assets on your behalf, either right away or once you become unable to manage them yourself. Grace's document was drafted to take effect immediately, which is common when a person wants help managing paperwork and banking without waiting for a crisis. Chidi lived out of town but agreed to take on the role, and for a long time nothing seemed unusual.

Then Grace had a stroke that left her with some cognitive difficulty and trouble managing day-to-day tasks. Ngozi began helping her mother sort through mail and bank statements — and that is when the numbers stopped making sense.

What the review found

Ngozi noticed a string of e-transfers and cash withdrawals from her mother's chequing account, most in amounts under $10,000, spread out over roughly a year. There were also two larger transfers, each around $40,000, moved into an account Ngozi did not recognize. When she asked Chidi about them, he described the money as reimbursement for expenses he had covered while managing their mother's affairs, and later as a loan he intended to repay. The explanations did not match, and Ngozi brought the statements to Treadstone Law.

An attorney for property owes the person who appointed them — called the grantor — a set of legal duties. They must act honestly, keep the grantor's property separate from their own, keep proper records of every transaction, and use the grantor's money only for the grantor's benefit, not their own. This obligation is sometimes described as a fiduciary duty, meaning the attorney must put the grantor's interests ahead of their own. An attorney is allowed to be reimbursed for reasonable expenses incurred on the grantor's behalf, and in some cases can be compensated for their time, but the amounts have to be documented and proportionate — not a running justification invented after the fact.

Our review of twelve months of bank and investment statements found withdrawals totalling roughly $95,000 that could not be tied to any expense, bill, or purchase connected to Grace's care or household. Some of the smaller withdrawals lined up loosely with periods when Chidi visited, which suggested at least part of the pattern was personal spending rather than outright theft — but the two larger transfers had no explanation that held up. Grace's cognitive difficulty after the stroke also raised a separate question: whether she had been capable of understanding and consenting to any of this at the time it happened, which mattered both for undoing the transactions and for deciding whether the power of attorney itself needed to be replaced.

What we did

1. Confirmed Grace's current capacity before acting on her instructions. Because a power of attorney can only be revoked by someone who still has the mental capacity to do so, we arranged a capacity assessment early. Grace's recovery had left her capable of understanding and managing her own affairs again, which meant she could personally direct the next steps rather than a substitute decision-maker having to step in on her behalf.
2. Revoked the existing power of attorney immediately. A grantor with capacity can revoke a power of attorney at any time, in writing, without needing anyone's agreement or a court order. We prepared a formal revocation, had Grace sign it, and gave written notice to Chidi and to Grace's bank the same week, cutting off his authority to move any further money.
3. Froze further access and notified the financial institutions. We contacted Grace's bank and investment firm directly to confirm the revocation was on file and to flag the account for review, which stopped any transactions that might still have been in progress under the old authority.
4. Demanded a full accounting from the former attorney. An attorney for property who has managed someone's finances can be required to produce a full accounting — a detailed record of every transaction, with supporting documents — showing exactly where the money went. We sent a formal demand for this accounting, which is often the step that either produces a credible explanation or exposes that none exists.
5. Negotiated repayment before pursuing court action. Chidi's accounting, when it came, could only account for about $35,000 of the roughly $95,000 in question, mostly tied to shared household costs during visits. Rather than starting with a court application to compel repayment — a route that is available under Ontario law but tends to take many months and adds legal costs on both sides — we opened a direct negotiation, backed by the threat of that application, aimed at recovering as much as possible without a prolonged fight that could further strain the family and erode whatever assets remained.
6. Put a new power of attorney in place with safeguards. Once the immediate crisis was contained, we helped Grace prepare a new power of attorney for property naming Ngozi as attorney, with a requirement that she provide periodic accountings to a third party — an arrangement Grace chose deliberately, understanding that oversight protects an attorney's reputation as much as it protects the grantor.

The outcome

Chidi agreed to repay $60,000 over eighteen months, secured by a written repayment agreement, after negotiations made clear that the alternative was a court application seeking the full accounting and repayment of all unexplained funds, along with the legal costs that process would involve. Grace decided against pursuing the remaining roughly $35,000 in loosely documented household spending, weighing the cost and family strain of further legal action against an amount that, while significant, was not going to change her financial security. That was Grace's decision to make, and we made sure she made it with full information rather than exhaustion.

The relationship between Grace and Chidi did not fully recover, and Ngozi found herself in the difficult position of managing both her mother's finances and a fractured sibling relationship. That cost does not show up on a balance sheet, but it was real, and it is worth naming honestly: acting quickly and correctly limited the financial damage, but it could not undo what had already happened. Grace's estate ended up roughly $35,000 smaller than it should have been — a loss that was contained rather than eliminated, and a hard lesson about how much can go wrong quietly before anyone notices.

Grace's home and investment portfolio, together still valued well within the $1.2 million to $2.5 million range her estate had always occupied, remained intact. The new power of attorney, with its built-in reporting requirement, gave Grace and the rest of the family a structure that made a repeat far less likely.

What you can learn from this