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Canadian-British billionaire Victor Dahdaleh leaves Southwark Crown Court in London on Jan. 13, 2012. Mr. Dahdaleh’s privately-held investment firm, Dadco Group, now owns 50 per cent of Brookfield Property Partners LP’s Bay Adelaide Centre in Toronto’s financial district.Sang Tan

Victor Dahdaleh, a British-Canadian businessman who was charged but acquitted in an international bribery case, has paid $850-million for part of an office complex in the heart of downtown Toronto.

Mr. Dahdaleh's privately-held investment firm, Dadco Group, now owns 50 per cent of Brookfield Property Partners LP's Bay Adelaide Centre in the city's financial district, according to land-registry documents. The property includes two office towers that are home to tenants such as accounting firms Deloitte and KPMG and law firms Borden Ladner Gervais and Fasken Martineau.

The deal marks one of the largest office deals in the Toronto market and the biggest property transaction so far this year.

The passive stake in the office buildings was put on the market late last year. But the sale did not attract the same number of investors that normally would have been interested in the prime Toronto office property.

Some Canadian pension funds, which are major players in commercial real estate, passed on the opportunity because they prefer to manage and operate their own buildings.

The deal with Mr. Dahdaleh allows Brookfield to continue managing the office complex. It is not known whether Brookfield has worked with him in the past.

News of the acquisition was first reported by CoStar Group, a commercial real estate firm.

The British-based businessman and philanthropist was accused of participating in a 20-year bribery scheme that involved U.S. aluminum giant Alcoa Inc. and a state-controlled aluminum firm in Bahrain. He was alleged to have helped Alcoa get contracts by bribing Bahraini officials, causing the country's metals firm to overpay for Alcoa's products. At the time, Mr. Dahdaleh denied any wrongdoing. A criminal case against him in Britain collapsed in 2013.

A unit of Alcoa eventually plead guilty in 2014 to violating U.S. anti-bribery laws and paid U.S. authorities a fine to resolve charges that it paid millions of dollars in bribes through a London-based middleman to Bahraini officials.

Mr. Dahdaleh was never identified as the middleman in the U.S. case. But when a trove of offshore accounts called the Panama Papers were leaked to news organizations, the Toronto Star and the CBC identified Mr. Dahdaleh as the middleman in question.

The businessman is well known in philanthropic circles. He runs his own charity, which grants scholarships to needy students. He is also a trustee of former U.S. president Bill Clinton's charity, as well as a board member of the McGill University Trust, which offers scholarships to British students attending the Montreal institution, according to his website.

A graduate of York University, he made a $20-million donation to the Toronto school. York gave him an honorary doctorate degree and established a centre in his name – the Dahdaleh Institute for Global Health.

He served as the president of the Canada-U.K Chamber of Commerce and is a board member of the International Aluminium Institute.

Mr. Dahdaleh's Dadco holding company was established in 1915 by his grandfather. It has operations and investments in Europe, North America, the Middle East, Africa and Australia, according to the web site. The land-registry documents show VPMA Bay Adelaide Property's listed in the care of Dadco Investments with an address in Channel Islands, a well-known tax haven.

The Bay Adelaide Centre sale took place amid a multiyear bull market in commercial real estate in Toronto. The sale was thought to be a way of gauging whether investors would still pay big prices for commercial real estate. There are only a few deals that come close in value to the Bay Adelaide Centre sale, such as Cadillac Fairview Corp.'s 30-per-cent stake of the Toronto-Dominion Centre for $880-million in 2015.

E-mails to Brookfield and Mr. Dahdaleh's firm seeking comment were not immediately returned.

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