Former Burlington building owner helped develop Florida condo that collapsed

A man who once owned apartment buildings in Burlington and was charged with evading taxes in the 1970s had a hand in the development of a condo that catastrophically collapsed in Florida Thursday, according to U.S. media reports.

Nathan Reiber, who died in 2014, was involved in a real estate partnership that developed the 12-storey Champlain Towers, which was built in 1980s, the Washington Post reported.

The building near Miami collapsed Thursday, has resulted in nine deaths so far, with 152 people still unaccounted for Sunday evening, according to a New York Times story.

As the search for survivors continued, U.S. media focused on how an engineer warned in 2018 he'd discovered structural problems with the Surfside, Fla. building.

A former condo board member, Max Friedman, told the Post the report resulted in a $15-million construction project to make repairs. It was an expensive project."

Investigators planned to review the engineer's reports in their probe of how the building collapsed, the Post story said.

In 1996, The Spectator reported Reiber, then a 69-year-old former lawyer from Toronto, had gone to Miami more than 15 years earlier to avoid Revenue Canada.

He and two business partners had been charged in the early 1980s with tax evasion and bookkeeping aimed at hiding income.

The trio owned apartment buildings in Burlington, where they'd skimmed" roughly $131,000 from self-operated coin laundries, according to reports, late-Spectator scribe Paul Legall wrote.

In July 1996, Reiber was fined $60,000 after pleading guilty to tax evasion in a Toronto court. He was given one year to pay the fine.

Reiber was also convicted of evading $59,500 in federal taxes by failing to declare $102,297 in income from 1971 to 1976. Legall reported.

The court also head he and his partners had cheated the tax department by issuing $120,000 in cheques to an unidentified person for construction work that never happened. The funds were placed in their personal accounts.

A warrant was issued for Reiber's arrest in the early 1980s after he went to Florida. He came back to Canada voluntarily.

Reiber was a graduate of the University of Alberta law school and was called to the Ontario bar in 1953.

An obituary in the Globe and Mail noted he died at age 86 in Miami on July 1, 2014 after a battle with cancer.

He was always a sharp businessperson," daughter Jill Meland told the Miami Herald. He enjoyed the game of business and was good at that."

Reiber also served on the boards of Mt. Sinai Hospital in Toronto and Miami Beach's Temple Emanuel. He supported the University of Miami, Mount Sinai Medical Center in Miami Beach and the Miami Jewish Health System, the Herald reported.

- With files from the Washington Post, New York Times and Miami Herald