The Black Rod

The looting of Winnipeg started almost as soon as Phil Sheegl got on the city payroll. And it lasted almost until the day he quit. That's the cold truth you're left with after reading the latest audit presented to city hall, an audit of five years of real estate deals conducted by the city under Sheegl's watch. Phil Sheegl, the best friend of Winnipeg Mayor Sam Katz, was hired in April, 2008, as the director of the city's department of planning, property and development. In  November, 2008, he was appointed deputy Chief Administrative Officer, and in 2011 he replaced Glen Laubenstein as CAO. Three months after Sheegl got the planning job, the city announced it was looking for real estate advisors and brokers to "assist the city with real estate transactions".  They eventually qualified five. "In the transactions where an external advisor was retained, there was no documentation explaining the rationale why an external adv...

Winnipeg's top civil servant is trying to prevent a city councillor from digging deeper into the mismanagement and possible corruption behind two projects which have gone millions of dollars over budget.    You have to wonder why.   Deepak Joshi, the fill-in Chief Administrative Officer, wrote a personal letter to Coun. Paula Havixbeck trying to intimidate her into silence over her persistance in getting to the bottom of the firehalls scandal, in which Joshi was involved up to his eyebrows, and the disastrous project to turn the downtown post office into a new headquarters for the police department.   Joshi was the city's Director of Planning, Property and Development (oh, the irony) when the twin fiascos of the firehalls and police HQ were unfolding. He was appointed Chief Operating Officer in 2011 by then CAO Phil Sheegl, who said in a news release: "I'm making these changes to clarify the roles and responsibilities of senior...

Once upon a time... Isn't that how all fairy tales start?   Last week construction company Shindico dispatched their talking head Bob Downs to spin a fairy tale for Christmas in which Sandy Shindleman and his brother Robert got to play the pretty princesses who need to be saved from the evil dragon, a role assigned to city auditor Brian Whiteside. It turns out that people thinking of doing business with Shindico are asking some embarrassing questions in the wake of the audit into the fishy construction of four firehalls by Shindico. To dispel suspicions, Shindico went on the offensive, declaring their innocence, condemning the auditors for getting it wrong, and hinting broadly that they know who is behind the heat and why. Was that a threat? It started with with CJOB's Richard Cloutier who gushed on air at getting an exclusive two-hour interview with Downs which included a "document dump" of, allegedly, the paper trail suppo...

Let's sum up the reaction to the Winnipeg Firehalls audit: *  Calls for a police investigation. The Taxpayers Federation has suggested the Winnipeg police or RCMP be involved.  The union that represents Winnipeg police added its voice to the idea, but says the RCMP should do it to avoid any hint of political interference. *  Outside lawyers being brought in to take a second look at whether the audit indicates any illegal activity beyond the unethical preferential treatment that was uncovered. “I think that there (are) lingering questions that need to be answered,” said Coun. Scott Fielding, the chairman of the city's standing policy committee on protection and community services. *  Renewed calls for the creation of an Ethics Commissioner for Winnipeg *  Calls from other councillors -- and thousands of Winnipeggers -- for Mayor Sam Katz to quit *  A plea from one city councillor, at least, for the province to intervene. A...

Almost a year ago, Winnipeg Mayor Sam Katz was cocky, cold, and curt when the press discovered that he bought a house in a suburb of Phoenix,  Arizona, from Winnipeg developer Sandy Shindleman's sister-in-law. The sparse and only record of the sale states that Katz paid $10 for the house valued at almost a million dollars. Terri Nordstrom, sister of Shindleman's wife, filed a "special warranty deed" in Colorado, where she lives, giving the price, and the Maricopa County Assessor's Office in Arizona provided an assessed value of the property. (The Maricopa County Treasurer's office currently shows Katz hasn't paid his 2013 taxes, $7509 owed, which were due Oct. 1, 2013.) Katz refused to answer questions about the house, other than to repeat like a broken record that he had paid "fair market value". It was a private matter and nobody's business how he knew Terri Nordstrom, when he paid for the house, and why tax...

A majority of Winnipeg city councillors decided Wednesday that the way to recapture the public's trust was to appoint as the city's top administrator a man who deserves to be fired for his role in the gross mismanagement and blatant favoritism that characterizes the Firehalls Scandal that's consuming City Hall. Way to go, team. Eleven councillors voted to appoint Deepak Joshi, the current Chief Operating Officer, as acting Chief Administrative Officer (CAO) to replace his mentor, Phil Sheegl, whose disastrous term ended last week when he quit just days before he would have gotten the axe. It's okay, they said, because Joshi will only be in charge of the city for a few months until a permanent CAO is picked.  And who wants to dwell on the past, when we can look forward to building a better city, blah blah blah. Well, to quote Shakespeare, what's past is prologue. An audit into the disastrous project of building four new fire st...

The fix was in right from the start. The external auditors who dissected the corpse of the Winnipeg Firehalls Fiasco looked for evidence of whether Shindico, the construction company owned by Mayor Sam Katz's friend and business partner, received special treatment when it got the nod to build four new fire stations. Their audit, released to the public Monday, reveals that favoritism for Shindico permeated the whole project like stink on a skunk. But the smoking gun doesn't appear until the end of Appendix G ---three maps, one letter and two emails from the back cover. It's a revelation by former Fire Chief Reid Douglas of a conversation he had with Phil Sheegl, who was then the Director of the Planning, Property and Development Department and Deputy CAO. Douglas, at the time, was the Deputy Fire Chief. Sheegl wasn't yet his boss; Sheegl wouldn't be confirmed as the city's Chief Administrative Officer, the most powerful man in Winn...

That's some audit you've got there, Mr. Whiteside. It hasn't been released to the public yet and already the city's Fire Chief has been fired and Winnipeg's most powerful administrator has resigned, the mayor's re-election chances have evaporated, and reporters are circling like buzzards over a dying donkey in anticipation of what's between the pages. On Monday, City auditor Brian Whiteside will give a committee of city council the first look at his audit (conducted by an out-of-Winnipeg firm on his behalf) of the convoluted, controversial and extremely fishy deals behind the construction of four new firehalls for Winnipeg. Former Fire Chief Reid Douglas and former Chief Administrative Officer Phil Sheegl got their own peeks at what the audit said about their roles in the scandal, and both are now gone. Coincidence,shouts Sheegl's close friend, Mayor Sam Katz. Neither man's departure had anything to do with the audit, ...