Mulroney highlights family, business acumen as she runs for Ontario Tories
Two Canadians who faced charges in Cambodia of producing pornographic photos during a party were on their way home Friday after a court allowed their release.
Eden Kazoleas and Jessica Drolet were among seven foreigners freed after being arrested last month for allegedly posting photos on social media of themselves engaged in sexually suggestive dancing.
Toronto lawyer Michael Tibollo, who has been involved with the case, said the two women were released from prison earlier in the week and prosecutors dropped all charges against them.
Kazoleas, 19, of Alberta, and 26-year-old Drolet, who is from Ontario, were jailed for more than a week and kept in a cell with more than 45 other women, Tibollo said.
“It was a very confined space,” he said. “They barely had space to lie around or make a bed to lie on, so the conditions were not the best.”
The pair were returning to Canada with Tibollo’s daughter, Frances, who negotiated their release, he said. He said the women left Cambodia shortly after their release, A group of foreigners stand after they were arrested for “dancing pornographically” at a party in Siem Reap town, near the country’s famed Angkor Wat temple complex. Two Canadians — 19-year-old Eden Kazoleas and 26-yearold Jessica Drolet — were among seven Westerners released on bail by a Cambodian court after they were arrested for allegedly posting photos on social media showing them engaged in sexually suggestive dancing.
flying to Thailand and then the Philippines before returning to Canada. The pair were due to arrive at Toronto’s Pearson International Airport at about 6 p.m. ET on Friday and were expected to speak to reporters, Tibollo said.
Yim Srang, a court spokesman in the northwestern Cambodian province of Siem Reap, said the investigation into the case has been completed and the seven people accused were
freed Wednesday. He said three other people remained in detention, but he didn’t know their names or nationalities.
The 10 people — including five from the United Kingdom, and one each from Norway, the Netherlands and New Zealand — were detained when police raided a commercially organized party at a rented villa in Siem Reap town and found people dancing at an event described as a pub crawl. Siem
Reap is near the famous Angkor Wat temple complex.
Police who conducted the raid originally detained almost 90 people, and it was unclear why they singled out 10 to remain in custody and be charged.
Police said those caught in the raid had been “dancing pornographically” and offended Cambodian standards of morality. They face up to a year in jail if convicted.
Toronto police are issuing a warning after a phone fraud scheme recently bilked five people in the city out of a combined $5.1 million, with investigators saying the scam appears to be targeting hundreds of people across the country.
Det. Sgt. Ian Nichol says starting in November, victims began coming forward about receiving calls from a retailer telling them they were the target of credit card fraud.
Police say the caller would remain on the line after telling victims to hang up and call 911 or their bank, exploiting a quirk in landline phone technology that allowed the fraudster to redirect the call seconds later to another impostor claiming to be a police detective or a bank fraud investigator.
Nichol says the fraudster posing as an investigator then allegedly told the victim to withdraw their assets and wire them to another location while the supposed investigation into the purported fraud affecting their credit card was being completed.
Police say victims would then wire their money to an account provided by the fraudsters and were told to keep their activity secret to protect the “investigation” into complicit bank employees.
“It appears to be a true mass marketing scheme in the sense that there are certainly hundreds of thousands of attempts being made,” Nichol said.
Caroline Mulroney highlighted her mother’s teachings on conservatism, her grandparents’ immigrant background, and her experience as a parent and businesswoman to a national gathering of conservatives on Friday as she sought to portray herself as a new kind of leader needed in Ontario politics.
The daughter of former prime minister Brian Mulroney is among three high-profile candidates vying to lead Ontario’s Progressive Conservatives, a party thrown into turmoil months ahead of a spring election after the departure of Patrick Brown, who resigned amid sexual misconduct allegations he emphatically denies.
Caroline Mulroney, a 43-yearold Toronto lawyer, said that while Canadians muse about her father’s impact on her politics, it was her mother’s side of the family that influenced her conservatism.
“People talk a lot about my dad and his experience and how that might influence me, but my mother was born in Yugoslavia,” Mulroney said at the Manning Conference in Ottawa Friday.
“My grandfather was a psychiatrist who was very religious. He moved to Canada because he wanted to be able to practice his religion which he couldn’t do. He wouldn’t sign the Communist Party list. When they moved my grandmother had to burn all of his diaries ... I ended up spending most of my youth with them, in their church.”
Mulroney said she sought her mother’s advice about the impact of political life on a family since both are mothers of four children.
“The person I really spoke to most about it though is my mother,” she said. “As much as I’m a career woman and was taking this step into politics, I’m also a mother of four, which my mother is (as well). So, I spent a lot of time with her talking about the challenges and how I would do that.”
Mulroney said while she talked with her father extensively before becoming a Progressive Conservative candidate last August, his advice was on a much more practical level.
“His advice to me was ‘your riding is big, drive safe,”’ she said. “He really came at it from a father’s perspective.”
Mulroney’s talk of family came as she works to style herself as a fresh face in provincial politics, one who has not previously held public office.