Multimillionaire developer jailed for ignoring court orders

Added: 2026-05-26

[00:00:00]A Vancouver multi-millionaire has been jailed after repeatedly ignoring a BC Supreme Court order to come clean to a creditor about her finances. A frustrated judge ordered sheriffs to take 49-year-old Helen Chanson into custody for civil contempt of court on Friday. She is a developer. Uh she's sole shareholder of this company called Landmark Premier Properties that owns number properties worth hundreds of millions of dollars around the Lower Mainland. And what this comes down to though is this loan that was made uh to a pair of companies back in 2018. She and another man guaranteed that loan and ultimately the creditors when the companies didn't pay, they came after the people that guaranteed the loan, her and this other guy. They got an order against her for about $5.6 million. She came to an agreement to pay but only paid about half the amount that she was supposed to pay cuz she felt apparently that the other guy should pay. But ever since then, they've been trying to get the rest of this money. Uh they've accused her of sort of hiding funds, of not coming full, you know, disclosure about everything that she owns and the source of her money, and of her luxury cars, and of a variety of other things, her clothes. And so it's worked its way through this process to where a judge in November gave her a suspended jail sentence, 40 days for civil contempt of court, giving her until, you know, actually February to come clean. When she didn't do that, she was brought to court for this proceeding that I went to see on Friday.

[00:01:30]And now you've covered many court cases, we know. What what is this one been like? What's Why is it different? Well, it's fascinating cuz at the end of the day this is somebody This is not a criminal act. This is somebody who was sent to jail for 40 days simply because they would not comply with an order. And anybody's tried to, you know, get money out of somebody who owes them money through the courts will be able to empathize with this. And this is ultimately what the judge said. A court orders have to mean something, and that's what this came down to. She didn't, uh, you know, comply with this order that she put out, and ultimately the judge said, "Take her away." The sheriffs took her away. They put her hands behind her back, put her in handcuffs. A woman worth millions of dollars took her off to jail.