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ly-designed boardroom of his law firm, Groia & Company, on the 10th floor of a down- town Toronto office tower, Groia evinces the contented air of a Cheshire cat who regularly makes a meal out of canaries. Which is not sur- prising given his victory last summer over the Ontario Securities Commission for his client, John Felderhof, the former head geologist for Bre-X Minerals Ltd. After a gruelling eight-year legal battle, Felderhof was found innocent on all charges of insider trading and fraud — a decision that triggered cries of outrage over the nation's apparently woeful track record for punishing alleged stock swindlers. Ironically, this win was against his former J where? particularly in Ontario, have this state of affairs? employer. Back in 1985 as a young gun not long out of law school, Groia went to work for the OSC as an associate general counsel. "My first week at the OSC, they had me negotiating a set- tlement with John Robinette," chortles Groia. One reason he was hired was to put some steel into the OSC's enforcement branch, which was considered quite pathetic at the time. "Back then the perception was the commission would have hearings once in a while to go after the boiler-room guys who were stealing from wid- ows and orphans," relates Groia. "But there was no enforcement presence in mainstream secu- rities transactions." Within 18 months of joining the OSC, he'd risen to become director of enforcement. And soon the big Bay Street boys were in his crosshairs — companies like Torstar, Canadian Tire, Maple Leaf Gardens, Canadian Malting, Southam, and the big banks. In the process, he pissed off a lot of people. During his reign at the OSC, the enforcement branch rose from 50 to 200 staffers, and from four lawyers to 25. Once he was approached by a senior Bay Street lawyer who asked Groia, "Don't you know who these people are?" "Yes, they're people who authorized a breach of the Toronto Stock Exchange bylaws and are acting contrary to the business interests of shareholders," Groia replied. www. CANADIAN Lawyermag.com JANU AR Y 2008 43 B Y BRUCE LIVESE Y oseph Groia is a paradox. After all, he seems to embody many of the aggravations plaguing Canada's system of uncovering and prosecuting fraud in our capital markets. A tall, cerebral, informal 53-year-old with salt-and-pepper beard and combative personality, as he chats in his handsome-