A former vice-president is suing TD Securities over her termination last year.Fred Lum/The Globe and Mail
A former rising star at Toronto-Dominion Bank’s investment-banking arm has hit out at the firm’s diversity practices in a $6-million lawsuit challenging her firing over alleged disclosure failures related to her husband’s trading accounts.
In a statement of claim filed with the Ontario Superior Court in Toronto earlier this year, Violeta Nusinoff alleges TD Securities Inc. did not have cause to fire her from her role as vice-president of mergers and acquisitions.
She claims the bank’s entire investigation was conducted in bad faith because it was premised on the false assertion she was on the deal team for a transaction involving TC Energy Corp. at the same time her husband traded that company’s shares.
“The confusion regarding TD’s mistaken belief that Violeta served on the TC Energy Deal Team arose from TD’s unlawful practice of misrepresenting the members of Deal Teams to clients for an improper purpose,” Ms. Nusinoff’s claim states.
“It was a well-known practice at TD that it would list women and/or under-represented minority groups as part of certain ‘Deal Teams’ to present a more ‘diverse’ team to potential clients in order to ‘win over’ the business. In certain cases, such as the TC Energy project, TD falsely listed individuals who had little to no involvement on the respective projects.”
In addition to damages for an unjust enrichment claim based on the alleged deal team misrepresentation, Ms. Nusinoff is also seeking more than $1-million in lost salary, benefits and incentive payments that she would have earned during a reasonable notice period, plus $5-million in punitive damages for TD’s actions in “effectively sabotaging” her financial services career.
None of the allegations in her statement of claim has been proven in court.
TD has not yet responded directly to Ms. Nusinoff’s claim, but has filed a notice of intent to defend with the Ontario Superior Court.
“We are confident in the integrity of our deals processes and strongly disagree with the allegations made in this claim. As this matter is before the courts, we are unable to comment on the specifics of the case,” said spokesperson Fiona Hirst in a statement to The Globe and Mail.
According to Ms. Nusinoff’s claim, she joined TD Securities as an associate in its investment banking group in August, 2020, soon after earning an MBA from the Ivey Business School at Western University. By January, 2023, she had been promoted to vice-president of mergers and acquisitions. Later that year, Ms. Nusinoff was recognized as a rising star at the Women in Capital Markets’ annual awards ceremony.
Trading activity
Ms. Nusinoff first raised her partner’s trading activity within weeks of her 2020 start date, her claim says. It alleges the TD Securities compliance group informed her that no disclosure was required at that time because they were not married or in a common-law relationship and she did not have any trading authority or beneficial interest in his accounts.
The pair married in December, 2022. Ms. Nusinoff’s claim says it was only after her return from a 13-month maternity leave, in early 2025, around the time she was completing training and compliance modules, that she realized she may be required to disclose her husband’s trading activity.
Up until that point, the couple had kept their finances private and wholly separate from one another, and Ms. Nusinoff’s claim says it was in discussions with her husband ahead of the disclosure that she first learned his investments consisted of anything more than some cryptocurrency holdings.
According to the claim, the bank began a review of her husband’s historical trades in May, 2025 and initiated an internal investigation the next month. Following a June 12 interview with an investigator, which Ms. Nusinoff claims focused mainly on her husband’s TC Energy trades, she was placed on leave with restricted system and e-mail access.
Ms. Nusinoff’s claim says TD later confirmed she was not on the TC Energy deal team. Still, the bank terminated her for cause two weeks after the interview, on June 24, alleging she had breached its code of conduct. TD reported her discharged employment status to the U.S. Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA), where Ms. Nusinoff was registered as a result of her work with TD’s affiliated U.S. broker.
In her claim, Ms. Nusinoff denies TD had cause to terminate her, alleging that its stated grounds in the termination letter and the statement to FINRA were either legally unsupported or factually false.
Instead, she claims she was wrongfully dismissed, having relied in good faith on the original 2020 guidance of the compliance team, before “promptly and voluntarily” disclosing her husband’s accounts in early 2025.
“Violeta, at all material times, acted in good faith. If her conduct was improper, which is denied, then it was inadvertent and, in any event, did not amount to a fundamental breakdown in the employment relationship or cause irreparable harm,” the claim reads.
Ms. Nusinoff is also seeking an order requiring TD to withdraw and correct its statements on her termination to FINRA, which are publicly accessible online.
“The public and permanent nature of the false FINRA record will irrevocably impair Violeta’s ability to secure comparable employment in the financial industry,” the claim reads.
Threshold for proving just cause is ‘extremely high’
Stuart Rudner, founder of Toronto employment law firm Rudner Law, has written a book on just cause dismissal and says it is notoriously hard to prove.
“A lot of people refer to just cause dismissal as the ‘capital punishment’ of employment law,” says Mr. Rudner, who has no involvement in the Nusinoff case and was speaking generally. “The threshold is extremely high, but it is definitely possible.”
“Every analysis of whether just cause exists is very fact-specific,” he adds, explaining that the individual’s employment history and any past discipline are all factors to be considered.
“With a bank, the nature of the industry is also relevant. They tend to take a much harder line on issues of trust than other organizations do,” he says.
Any judge hearing the case will also look closely at the surrounding context when assessing whether an employer was right to invoke just cause.
“Courts are very protective of employees, and if there are allegations of misconduct, they will want to see that a fair and impartial investigation was conducted,” Mr. Rudner says. “If they think it was more of a prosecution than an investigation, then they will penalize the employer.”