(ADAM PROSKIW / iNFOnews.ca)

OPINION

Things have gotten worse at the Thompson-Nicola Regional District, not better.

The regional district is dealing with the fallout of a spending scandal among a few bureaucrats there — one in particular — but it's messy.

The RCMP, in a rare moment of candour I’ll return to later, said despite a mountain of evidence it didn’t even have to collect, it’s not pursuing criminal charges against former top manager Sukh Gill. As we pointed out last week, that means Gill will face no repercussions — at all — for treating the TNRD’s bank accounts as if they were his own.

He’s still living a quiet, comfortable retirement in Kamloops. He still hangs out with his buddies from the Rotary Club, can still call himself and work as a professional accountant and no doubt still enjoys dinners at Nandi’s, though perhaps it’s not as sweet, having to pay for it himself.

This after a forensic audit showed him pillaging various accounts and describing in detail how he wielded his immense power as CAO over other managers and staff to get it done. This was what I warned about before, that these CAOs have far too much power and not nearly enough checks and balances on that power.

Bureaucrats are funny. When you deal with them as a reporter, they try to pass off every decision and controversy onto mayors or chairpersons and their council or boards. They never like to take responsibility. TNRD is not alone in this. The City of West Kelowna, for one example, now just refuses to answer questions it doesn’t like. It’s clear to me now — these bureaucrats deserve far more scrutiny. No more cover, just because you’re not a politician.

Beyond that, what has happened in Kamloops is a social travesty, if not injustice. I once watched the Crown put a school district caretaker on trial for a week and got a conviction for fraud because he padded his timesheet. He was claiming hours for callouts he never got. It added up to a hill of peanuts and I couldn’t understand why they were doing it. I asked the prosecutor in the hallway what was up and he shrugged: the man committed a crime, he said, as if it were that simple.

I covered another trial — even longer and incredibly detailed — where the Crown sent in the biggest guns it had to prosecute a case against Pat Derrick Property Management. Pat Derrick herself profited large after raiding the trust accounts of her strata clients. But she faced no criminal charges at all. It was her young bookkeeper whose full-time job was kiting cheques between accounts so every time the clients looked, all the money was there. She’s the one who went to jail. Again I asked the Crown in the hallway and their answer was: Pat Derrick couldn’t have done what she did if the bookkeeper didn’t enable her. The Crown needed a conviction on this case that cost Okanagan residents millions of dollars and set the stage for new regulations for the industry.

It mattered not who they put in jail — but it sure wasn't the woman at the top.

The case of Sukh Gill appears to be more of the same; one set of rules and expectations for the little guys, quite another for the people on top. It also offers no greater confidence the RCMP has any handle on or ability to investigate white collar crime.

We’ve tried to nail down a dollar figure for misspent money but that was hard to do because it’s all muddied under acceptable spending limits and that awful word ‘discretion’. It’s not insignificant, it’s in the 10s of thousands of dollars. But that’s just the low-hanging fruit, easily provable. There’s far more than that. The investigation only covered five of his years at the top and it showed a pattern that could have justified going back much further if it weren’t so expensive. There's also hundreds of thousands of dollars in unexplained losses, like his habit of buying gift cards, or filing un-itemized expenses, graft to family members and their businesses or employers. That looks like clear actus reus to me.

The forensic investigation showed a pattern of willful behaviour. Gill was a professional accountant and the finance manager of the TNRD before he became CAO. That means he knew exactly what he was doing when he made the decision hundreds of time over the years to split expenses and solicited donations for his own charities from TNRD suppliers and contractors with the wink-wink promise of favours. He knew that it was wrong, legally, professionally and morally. That’s a breach of trust in my books and would likely establish the mens rea.

The Crown’s basic charge approval standard is whether it’s in the public interest and whether there’s a substantial likelihood of conviction. Well this is clearly in the public interest. Perhaps it fails on the second part of the test. We’ll never know.

The fact the RCMP even told us it wouldn’t forward the investigation to the Crown for charges is interesting. They’re generally not in the habit of informing the public about the status of investigations or charges (of anything, really, anymore) but in this case seemed to go out of its way to partially exonerate Gill.

Meanwhile, there have been tepid calls for the resignation of board chair Ken Gillis. I read some comments on these stories and it’s clear people confuse him for Gill. Gillis should resign but for vastly different reasons. From what we’re hearing, he bungled this case from the outset. It appears he was got a letter from a whistleblower at TNRD and didn’t share it with the board for two years. There’s also whispers that he got wind of different allegations about Gill — before the spending allegations — and that led to the most bizarre termination. They paid him $500,000 in severance and agreed to call his departure a “retirement” instead of what it should have been — termination with cause.

But as attention turns to Gillis, don’t lose the forest for the trees. Sukh Gill did all this. This is his shame.

Add it up and I don’t know what other conclusion you can come to. There’s a set of rules for fat cats like Sukh Gill and everyone else at the top. The rest of us can kick rocks.

— Marshall Jones is the Managing Editor of iNFOnews.ca

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