A Supreme Court judge ruled in favour of a West Kelowna man his insurance company accused of lighting his own house on fire in 2015.
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March 27, 2018 - 5:30 PM
WEST KELOWNA – A B.C. Supreme Court judge has sided with a 76-year-old West Kelowna man whose insurance carrier denied his claim on suspicion he set his own house on fire in 2015.
George Apostolidis’ home on Alexander Place caught fire Sept. 22, 2015 while he and his wife were in Penticton for the night. The fire was eventually deemed arson when an accelerant was found.
A Supreme Court decision released March 26 says investigators found a message left by the arsonist.
“Red spray paint was used to paint “SATAN IS KING”, “BURN IN HELL”, “DIE” and “666” on the concrete patio adjacent to the swimming pool, and “666” on a retaining wall adjacent to the driveway,” Justice Ian Crawford Meiklem writes.
The defendant, Canadian Northern Shield Insurance Company, denied coverage of $425,000, calling it “more than likely” the elderly, illiterate widower intentionally caused the fire himself.
Apostolidis listed the home for sale on May 27 but a sale for $735,000 fell through and the property was still on the market at the time of the fire.
On the afternoon before the fire, Apostolidis and his new wife left the house for Penticton, where they went to the Lakeside Resort casino hotel and stayed overnight. They left the next morning after police called and told him about the fire, which was out by the time firefighters arrived.
There was no sign of forced entry to any door, but a padlocked gate at the rear of the house giving entry to the back yard had been forcefully broken open by prying a padlock from its mount. There were red paint smears on the locking lever of a sliding glass door and on an adjacent light switch.
“The plaintiff’s overnight stay in Penticton means that it is virtually a certainty that the plaintiff did not commit the arson himself,” Justice Meiklem concludes. “Although the defendant has been fairly tenacious in pursuing its suspicions of the plaintiff, it did not begin to suggest that he had ingeniously contrived a false alibi by sending his cell phone to Penticton, or leaving it there with his wife while he returned to commit the arson with the use of a borrowed or rented vehicle.
“It could be said that hypothetically the opportunity to hire a third party arsonist is available to any insured with unsavoury connections… (but) there was no evidence connecting the plaintiff to anyone who might be the arsonist, despite investigations having been conducted by both the RCMP and the defendant.”
Canadian Northern Shield also argued Apostolidis “had an obvious financial motive to wish to have his house destroyed by fire." After his wife died in 2014 he discovered that with pensions and savings, he could only afford the home for six more months.
He says he decided to sell the 7,000 sq. ft. home because it was “far too large for himself as a widower” and he planned to relocate to Hawaii. He owed roughly $200,000 at the time of the fire.
“If his motivation was to simply free himself from the mortgage payments, he of course had the obvious option of lowering the list price further,” Meiklem writes. “In his circumstances, he would have been the quintessential motivated seller.”
He granted the claim under the policy along with costs.
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