He was sentenced to six months in jailMacAskill's prior legal battles MacAskill's prior legal battles
The lawsuit against Stockhouse is not the first that Mr. MacAskill has fought on his own, without the benefit of a lawyer. In 2009, he launched a lawsuit against Hudson's Bay Company, claiming that he was tortured by store security. He complained that while he was at the company's store in Brentwood Town Centre on Dec. 10, 2008, a security guard detained him and refused to allow him to go to the bathroom, which he urgently needed to do. Rather than suffer the humiliation of urinating himself, he chose to knock himself out by banging his head on the wall, the suit stated. His next memory was waking up in a puddle of urine (which he claims was not his own, but that of some other person security had detained). He was then escorted from the store by an RCMP officer. He was not charged. He later agreed to drop the suit on undisclosed terms.
Mr. MacAskill launched another self-filed suit in August, 2007, against a former employer, Kor Alta Construction Ltd. of Alberta. He claimed that the company constructively dismissed him from his job as a supervisor at a job site on Boundary Road in Vancouver after he complained about a lack of a plan to deal with asbestos at the site. Kor-Alta, in response to the suit, denied any wrongdoing and said Mr. MacAskill had worked at the company for only a short period of time. A judge later dismissed the case, finding that it was an abuse of the process of the court.
Earlier court records show that Mr. MacAskill landed in criminal trouble in 1995, when a judge convicted him on 10 counts of tax fraud over GST refunds he had collected for a number of companies. He was sentenced to six months in jail and ordered to pay a $13,500 fine.
Stockhouse no longer trades, the company having gone private in 2010. It was last owned by Invictus Financial Inc., which was downgraded to the NEX on Dec. 13, 2011