RCMP commissioner Mike Duheme has confirmed that the federal police force is currently investigating a scandal involving the Liberal government allegedly distributing tens of millions of taxpayer dollars to ineligible companies.
Police have said they are looking at whether there is any criminal wrongdoing associated with the Sustainable Development Technology Canada scandal.
In comments made to reporters on Thursday, Duheme confirmed that the RCMP have received documents pertinent to the scandal and is currently conducting an investigation into the matter.
“We did receive the documents and investigations are ongoing so I’ll limit my comments to that,” said Duheme.
SDTC – a crown corporation dedicated to advancing clean technology innovation – has come under fire after government oversight bodies concluded its board of directors and executives were involved in gross mismanagement of taxpayer funds and misconduct.
In June, just before the House of Commons’ summer recess, the Conservative party with the help of the Bloc Québécois, NDP and Green party passed a motion calling on the Trudeau government to surrender all relevant documents to the House’s law clerk who would then hand over the documents to the RCMP.
The Trudeau government has defied the order from the House, resulting in a condemnation from Liberal House Speaker Greg Fergus.
Government business in the House of Commons has ground to a screeching halt and will only resume once the Trudeau government complies with the order.
Opposition house leader Andrew Scheer celebrated the news that there was an investigation while demanding the Liberals release the SDTC files to the House.
“RCMP say they are investigating Liberal slush fund. Liberal insiders funnelled taxpayers’ money into their own businesses. Now Trudeau refuses to hand over all the evidence to the cops. Why the cover-up?” said Scheer.
The auditor general’s report and the ethics commissioner’s report, as well as an investigation conducted by Raymond Chabot Grant Thornton have found that SDTC’s board of directors and its executives had violated the Crown corporation’s funding agreement with the government, had breached conflict-of-interest and ethics laws while firing employees to cover up complaints.
In a report released in June, the auditor general stated that SDTC had granted millions of dollars to companies that were ineligible for funding under SDTC’s contribution agreement with the government.
Since the auditor general’s office had only looked at 58 of the projects that SDTC had granted funding to, they estimate that 1 in 10 start-up and scale-up projects that were awarded money were ineligible.
In a previous report commissioned by Innovation, Science, and Economic Development Canada – the department responsible for administering SDTC – it was found that in a sample of 19 companies that had been awarded multi-million dollar grants, three of them had violated SDTC’s contribution agreement.
According to a whistleblower who spoke to True North, these three companies were GHGSat, Semios, and Miovision, which were awarded $20,000,000, $17,000,000, and $16,580,000 respectively.
The auditor general also found 90 instances in which SDTC’s Board of Directors had violated conflict of interest policies by voting on or participating in discussions about a company they had previously declared a conflict of interest with. These 90 cases were connected to projects that totalled nearly $76 million in funding from taxpayers.
In a July report from the ethics commissioner, former SDTC board member Annette Vershcuren was found to have violated the Conflict of Interest Act twice by benefiting companies associated with the Verschuren Centre – a clean technology accelerator that she founded.
Former SDTC board director Guy Ouimet was also found to be in a conflict of interest with his role in a company he helped to found called Lithion Technologies, though he was cleared of any wrongdoing on the basis that he did not own enough Lithion stock to truly benefit from the grant.
In an exclusive report from True North, it was discovered that Ouimet sits on the board of Lithion Technologies, a company that received $3,842,000 in funding from SDTC on August 29, 2018, just one and a half months after Lithion was incorporated.
