Saskatoon man loses appeal in child harbouring case involving mistress

SASKATOON—Saskatchewan’s Court of Appeal has refused to hear an appeal of a man’s conviction for taking and hiding the daughter he fathered with his Brazilian mistress.

However, it has agreed with a Crown argument that the 15-month sentence handed to Alexander Levin for child harbouring was too light, and increased the sentence to two years.

Levin told a Saskatoon court he took the girl from her mother as punishment when he found out the woman had been seeing other men.

Levin and his mistress were visiting Ukraine when he took the one-year-old child to the Philippines.

He left her there with a seamstress he had just met and returned to his wife and four children in Canada.

Levin had argued unsuccessfully in his appeal that the Saskatoon Provincial Court had no jurisdiction to try the case, as the offence occurred outside Canada.

His trial was told he met Oziene Barbosa online and started an affair with her in Brazil about three years ago. She got pregnant and gave birth while Levin was back in Canada.

The couple’s daughter, Ieda Alexendra Levin, was already a year old when he went back to Brazil to meet the child last spring.

Levin, Barbosa and the little girl were already in Ukraine when he acquired Barbosa’s Facebook password, went through her profile and discovered that she had been seeing at least three other men while they were apart.

Levin said he felt infidelity is “the most heinous act one person can inflict on another” and had expected his mistress to stay faithful—even though he had a wife and family back home.

The child has since been returned to her mother.