BC NDP denies so-called ‘caucus stash’
Posted March 12, 2013 12:49 pm.
This article is more than 5 years old.
VANCOUVER (NEWS1130) – BC’s Auditor General has accused the NDP of siphoning constituency funds to create a caucus stash that may have reached $460,000.
Worried about how the money was being managed, John Doyle found in his report that much of it went to Gabriel Yiu, a two-time NDP candidate who will run again in May.
NDP Caucus Chair Shane Simpson insists no money went to help the party.
“Absolutely nothing untoward,” he says. “It was support for the caucus. Caucus members all receive a pretty modest budget to run your offices.”
“It doesn’t allow you a lot of money to deal with additional things.”
The controversy comes as the New Democrats accuse the BC Liberals daily of mismanaging taxpayer money, but Simpson says there’s no comparison here.
“We used no public servants and not one dime of this went to the party,” he explains. “It all stayed in the caucus.”
“The Liberals, what we saw, was a clear strategy to hire public civil servants to collect information and intelligence and feed it to the BC Liberal Party,” adds Simpson.
He tells us the opposition caucus has a tight budget and the money went to additional expenses.