For two days, Dominique Ollivier multiplied the half-truths in various media in response to the revelations made by our investigative office regarding the questionable expenditure of the Office de Consultation Publique de Montréal (OCPM).
• Also read: $900 headphones, hockey tickets and numerous taxi rides… more questionable expenses at OCPM
• Also read: Mayor Valérie Plante will ask the comptroller to shed light on the Office de Consultation Publique de Montréal’s expenses
• Also read: “I am a strict and honest person”; The former president of the OCPM defends its integrity
Our Bureau of Investigation corrects the allegations made by the President of the Montreal Executive Committee, who served as President of the OCPM from 2014 to 2021.
- At Paul Arcand’s microphone she explained on Tuesday: “I gave a 45-minute interview I where I explained in detail each of the questions they asked me and at Montreal Journal. They sent me questions back four times and I sent them the receipts.”
Prior to this interview, Ms. Ollivier’s team told us that they would not comment on the spending of current OCPM leaders. She also avoided commenting on the OCPM standards, saying only that she respected them.
Ms Ollivier did not provide any supporting documents (restaurant bill, plane tickets, train ticket, hotel receipt, etc.). The only document sent is a photo of several people at his company, allegedly taken in Australia in 2016 to justify taxi rides. According to his team, these were members of the Sandringham town council that Dominique Ollivier met. His team was unable to identify the individuals and simply asked us to try to read the (illegible) badges in the photo.
To find out the names of the people Dominique Ollivier met in Australia in January 2016, just read the “badges” on their clothes, his team tells us. Photo provided by Dominique Ollivier
- Still on 98.5 FM, she returned to her statement: “You are working very hard to uncover a scandal.” MMe Ollivier explained: “When I said that, I was already repeating the same thing 45 minutes into the interview.”
She actually said that sentence twice. The first time after an 11-minute interview in response to a question about his recommendation to his friend Isabelle Beaulieu to become commissioner of the OCPM.
“I understand that you want to cause a scandal. What I mean to say is that I didn’t give her a name. I definitely recommend it,” she said.
She repeated the same thought in the 19th minute of our interview. We asked her why she chose to hold an internal meeting at a full-service restaurant instead of the office offices while eating a sandwich.
“I understand that you are working very hard to create a scandal that does not exist,” she replied.
- Regarding the $17,793 spent on dining out and travel expenses, she told Radio-Canada’s Téléjournal on Monday: “These expenses were made over a long period of time between 2014 and 2020.
In fact, she spent $17,793 on dining out between 2016 and 2019 alone, including $5,340 in 2019 alone.
Between 2018 and 2019, she visited 15 times for a total of $1,977. She also traveled to Takara 46 times between 2016 and 2019 for $3,555.97, or to Ikanos nine times between 2017 and 2019 for a total of $1,369.32, always at taxpayer expense.
In addition, our investigative office only disclosed Ms. Ollivier’s travels in 2016. There were several other foreign assignments in 2017, 2018 and 2019, which also incurred costs.
- Still in the Téléjournal she explained: “I would still like to remind you that all these expenses were audited every year. So every year the city’s auditor general [de Montréal] We checked all of our expenses and never mentioned to each other that there was a problem.”
As of January 1, 2018, due to a legislative change by the Government of Quebec, Montreal’s Office of the Auditor General will no longer conduct financial audits of the Office de Consultation Publique. Since then, the audits have been carried out by an external company.
Additionally, an accounting audit does not review all expenses.
Each Auditor General’s report notes that an audit “does not in any way relieve management of its responsibilities,” particularly with regard to “internal control” and “fraud prevention and detection.”
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