Victories

Leslie Kaufman – May 8, 2012

A senior Environmental Protection Agency chemist who argued that she was removed from her job in retaliation for accusing the agency of underestimating the toxicity of dust at ground zero has been reinstated with back pay by an administrative board.

The federal Merit Systems Protection Board ruled late last week in Washington that the agency violated the due process rights of the chemist, Cate Jenkins, when she was fired in 2010 because she was not informed of all the charges against her.

John Burman – March 15 2012

Morteza Jafarpour, executive director of the now-defunct Settlement and Integration Services Organization in Hamilton, has been charged with defrauding the federal government of more than $4 million between 2008 and 2010.

The Royal Canadian Mounted Police, Hamilton Niagara commercial crime section charged Jafarpour, 52, of Ottawa and Ahmed Robert Salama, 39, of Oakville, Wednesday following a 15-month investigation with Hamilton police.

Jonathan Stempel – February 16, 2012

It wasn't Sherry Hunt's original intent to go public on the shoddy quality control at a mortgage unit at Citigroup Inc, her employer since 2004. But by March 2011, as it became apparent to her that the problems were getting worse and not being addressed, the Missouri quality assurance manager decided enough was enough.

"I set up an appointment with human resources and ethics and told them everything," Hunt recalled in a telephone interview. "They did some cursory investigation. The sad part is, they never ever told me, 'Sherry, you were right,' or 'Sherry, you're looking at this wrong.' There were no assurances."

Kevin Donovan – February 3, 2012

Ontario’s Health Ministry and the province’s financial investigations team were warned of serious problems at Ornge three years ago, documents reveal. An Ornge accountant blew the whistle in 2008, telling the province that the publicly funded Ornge was “handing out money like water.”

In an interview audiotaped in 2008 by Ministry of Finance investigators, Keith Walmsley said former Ornge boss Dr. Chris Mazza, who was fired Thursday, and other executives were paying themselves whopping bonuses and had set up a spiderweb of for-profit companies. Walmsley went on to provide detailed allegations of numerous abuses of taxpayers money and said Ornge was deceiving the cash-strapped Health Ministry, hiding a $5-million annual surplus in taxpayers funds by using a double set of books.