(Edited 10:06 AM PDT)
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I and other news readers were a little taken aback by this fascinating article over the weekend which seems to expose some serious political shenanigans at the student union executive level at a state-owned taxpayer-funded community college in Vancouver. Clearly to me, the culprits were Liberals. We see the word Liberal (as in Liberal Party) and names of Liberal Party activists including even Michael Ignatieff’s staff in the article, which describes how student union cash was possibly (obviously wrongly) used to purchase electoral support and advice from the Liberal Party activists and organizers.
I’m now equally taken aback by how the national news media is absolutely silent on this report this morning, considering the links to a Liberal Party candidate’s staff—a potential leader and Prime Minister—and other Liberal Party operatives.
The woman who exposed the alleged corruption was Laura Anderson. The article by reporter Doug Ward about Anderson’s work and eventual vindication is huge—occupying more than one full page of the paper—and for those interested in student politics and how they may or may not relate to and resemble more grown-up (?) Liberal Party politics, it is intriguing.
Audit vindicates whistleblower
How one student exposed student association’s diverted funds
Doug Ward, Vancouver Sun
Published: Saturday, September 15, 2007Laura Anderson was a Cassandra at Kwantlen College through much of 2005 and 2006, warning everyone who would listen that something was rotten in the school’s student association.
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The Vancouver Sun article includes this picture of the alleged culprit, Aaron Takhar, sitting on the right.
The part-time horticulture student complained that the new executive of the Kwantlen Student Association was abusing democratic procedures and playing fast and loose with the KSA’s million-dollar budget.
“They were treating the KSA like it was their personal piggy bank and private club house,” Anderson recalled in an interview this week.
The KSA executive became dominated in May 2005 by the Reduce All Fees (RAF) slate.
“We now refer to the RAF period as the ‘dark time,’ ” Anderson said. “We had directors who were either failing to report financial information or falsifying it.”
The leader of this new group was Aaron Takhar, a young, charismatic Kwantlen political science student who was chairman of the KSA during 2005 and then became a paid executive adviser in 2006.
Takhar’s focus was more on finances and less on policy. In a March 2006 e-mail, he urged other RAF executive members “to focus on the money makers.”
The reception Anderson received when she criticized the Takhar-led KSA wasn’t always positive. Many people didn’t believe her or didn’t care.
“I was like the crazy person who stands at the corner, yelling that horrible things are going on while people walk by discounting me as being crazy.”
A forensic audit by PricewaterhouseCoopers released earlier this month confirmed that Anderson’s warnings weren’t crazy.
The audit provided her some vindication, uncovering a maze of financial impropriety one current student leader described as “Enron Lite.”
The $100,000 audit found that during the period from December 2005 to November 2006 the KSA executive made $144,500 in undocumented payments to KSA executives and employees, including $67,000 to Takhar, $20,000 to past KSA president Danish Butt and $17,000 to former KSA CEO Yasser Ahmad.
The audit, by auditor Mary Ann Hamilton, also found that about $620,000 of student money was loaned out as part of what she called a “high-risk” investment strategy to Apex Communications, a Surrey-based telecommunications company.
She learned that the KSA had paid $1,776 to a security firm called Dolo Investigations for undisclosed surveillance work.
Hamilton also recovered deleted e-mails showing that Takhar’s group paid out $5,000 to a federal Liberal activist and organizer in Michael Ignatieff’s unsuccessful leadership campaign.
The auditor also complained that the RAF regime was not transparent in its governance: “It appears that the prior council were either not keeping proper records or they deliberately removed these documents from the KSA main office.”
The KSA ordered the Pricewaterhouse-Coopers audit after a group led by Anderson defeated Takhar’s RAF group in a court-ordered election in October 2006.
Takhar last week described the PricewaterhouseCoopers audit as a “surface investigation that didn’t look into any of the matters in great detail.”
He said that the audit was compromised because it had been ordered and financed by Anderson and her new KSA executive.
Read the whole article. It includes these other tidbits as pulled by PTBC reader Maureen:
The driver of the car, Daljit Sandhu, who had also attended Kwantlen and campaigned for Takhar’s RAF slate, drowned when he drove the vehicle into the Nechako River to escape the police. Police had initially pulled over Takhar in a separate car and were about to pull over Sandhu when the SUV plunged into the river.
Months later, Anderson and others launched a court action to nullify their expulsions at the 2005 special meeting. They also sought to have the results of the 2006 election declared void because Takhar had appointed the chief returning officer, Amar Randhawa, a federal Liberal activist.
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Hamilton also found out that a company called Kultak Financial Inc. had previously loaned $150,000 to Westlund. She said the shareholders of Kultak are Alan and Kuldip Takhar, who she believed are relatives of Aaron Takhar as they share the same home address.
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Hamilton also found that the KSA had loaned $200,000 to Inderjit Johal out of the KSA’s health and dental plan.
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The investigation also learned that the previous executive paid $5,000 to Bilal Cheema in August 2006 for strategic communications advice—just two months prior to the court-ordered student election.
Cheema has served as special assistant to a number of federal Liberal ministers and was a key organizer in B.C. for the Ignatieff campaign.
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Jacques Leger was president of the New Westminster-Coquitlam federal Liberal association and, along with Cheema himself, an organizer in the Ignatieff leadership campaign.
An e-mail from Takhar to Butt referred to the upcoming election and said: “keep updated, read below … our final surprise will be, guess who … Jacques (sic)!! DELETE THIS E-MAIL RIGHT NOW, and from your trash folder!!”
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Other recovered e-mails show that the RAF group was also interested in gaining influence in the student societies at Langara College, Douglas College and Simon Fraser University.
An e-mail in July 2006 from Takhar to KSA president Butt said: “Danish, aren’t you going to register us at langara SOON? we need to find out their structure and then register people accordingly. …
Takhar is now a political science student at Simon Fraser University, and is active in student politics. One wonders how many of this kind of grassroots Liberal Party supporters the Liberal Party has.
(Thanks to Maureen for her work in pulling out some of the good bits).
PTBC was founded by Mr. Johannesen in 2000.
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