Ontario's Financial Services Tribunal has confirmed the refusal of the Financial Services Regulatory Authority of Ontario (FSRA) to renew the insurance licence of Leszek Dziadecki and revoked the corporate licence of his firm, Advantage Group of Finance Inc.
Dziadecki, licensed as a life and accident and sickness insurance agent since 1993, built a practice in the Greater Toronto Area and trained more than 40 agents. FSRA first proposed pulling his licence in October 2025, and Insurance Business reported on that initial notice in December. The Tribunal's decision, issued after a three-day hearing in May, is the final word.
The ruling fits a broader pattern of FSRA scrutiny of Ontario agents over the past year. In the same period, FSRA proposed a $35,000 penalty against agent Chauhan over alleged false statements made during solicitation, and revoked the licence of agent Minh Anh Nguyen for falsifying documents and misappropriating client funds. Coverage of these cases has pointed to increased regulatory scrutiny on Ontario insurance agents and firms, with tighter compliance requirements and greater emphasis on governance, risk management and transparency, particularly for smaller brokerages and independent agents.
The panel's central legal move was accepting findings from the Canadian Investment Regulatory Organization (CIRO) and the Capital Markets Tribunal as presumptive proof, rather than reopening them. Those bodies had found Dziadecki improperly promoted syndicated mortgage investments, resulting in a permanent industry ban, a $300,000 fine and $30,000 in costs - sanctions the Capital Markets Tribunal upheld on appeal in 2024.
The panel wrote that a licensee who continues to reject the conclusions of a fair process that has been reviewed on appeal undermines his own suitability case, since the question isn't only what happened, but what it signals about future conduct. Dziadecki had argued the FSRA case was the product of a "domino effect" triggered by what he called an unfair CIRO ruling. The Tribunal rejected that framing, citing Supreme Court precedent on the finality of adjudicative decisions and ruling that Dziadecki's own path to challenge CIRO's findings was through appeal, not by asking a different regulator to reach a different conclusion.
The Tribunal did give Dziadecki some credit: it reduced the weight of a 2021 Mutual Fund Dealers Association settlement after finding his account of that episode credible, and treated a 2023 FSRA warning letter as a minor administrative matter. Not every FSRA case ends in revocation - in a 2025 matter involving agent Balachandran, the regulator instead reached a Minutes of Settlement, giving the licensee a structured path to maintain business operations rather than pursuing licence revocation or financial penalties.
What the panel could not get past was conduct inside Dziadecki's own insurance practice. He admitted borrowing $150,000 from an insurance client without disclosing the conflict of interest and giving that same client a $60,000 cheque in 2025 that he knew would not clear. The panel called this "confirmation, in the context of Dziadecki's core insurance business" of the pattern found elsewhere. It also considered conditions or supervision as an alternative to revocation but rejected them, noting Dziadecki was the sole director of Advantage Group with no one to enforce conditions against, and that his past compliance failures had consistently occurred "below the sight line of his regulator."
For brokers and agents who hold or once held licences in adjacent regulated sectors - mutual funds, mortgages, financial planning - this ruling signals that FSRA and the Tribunal will treat findings from those other regulators as established fact in an insurance suitability review, not as separate history to be re-argued.
