More than 1,300 rich mainland Chinese have joined a lawsuit against Canada's immigration authorities in a last-ditch attempt to escape Ottawa's decision to shut down its millionaire migrant scheme and terminate tens of thousands of applications, the South China Morning Post reported yesterday.

Tim Leahy, the Toronto lawyer behind the Federal Court case that goes before Justice Mary Gleason today, is seeking C$5million (HK$35.7 million) in compensation for each applicant and their dependents unless the government agrees to assess their cases, the report said.

Leahy said 1,335 of his 1,446 clients had lodged their applications for the federal Immigrant Investor Programme (IIP]) in Hong Kong. Virtually all of the Hong Kong applicants are mainland Chinese, according to the report.

The litigation, if successful, represents a potential payout of C$18 billion, based on an average of 2.5 individuals per application. Leahy regards the threat of such a payout as the "poison pill" that would force the processing of the applications.

Although the scheme's cancellation was announced in the Canadian federal budget on February 11, the termination of the applications in the queue will not go into effect until the budget is passed, expected on June 26.

"Faced with that [C$18 billion] cost, I would expect CIC [Citizenship and Immigration Canada] to agree to finalise the cases on the merits even though it will have terminated your file when the budget nill passes," Leahy said in an e-mail to clients last month that was also shared with the South China Morning Post.

Leahy said on Monday that by inserting the IIP's cancellation and the backlog's termination in a budget bill, the government was seeking to avoid "full parliamentary scrutiny".

Immigration data shows that of the 66,423 individuals in the federal immigrant investor backlog as of last July, 50,131 had lodged their applications via Hong Kong.

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