After 6-year investigation, no charges in ORNGE fiasco
OPP probe into air ambulance unit finds millions flowed back to company run by former CEO, but police say a lack of witness co-operation and missing documents forced them to drop case
As former ORNGE boss Dr. Chris Mazza bounced from hospital to hospital looking for jobs over the years, no doubt peering over his shoulder from time to time, the OPP tried to pry secrets from witnesses and documents. Thursday, after six years, police gave up trying and released their conclusions:
Yes, Ontario and ORNGE overpaid $4.77 million for Italian helicopters and that money flowed back to a Mazza-controlled private company. The Star exposed that in 2012, which prompted the Liberal government to call in the cops.
No, the OPP would not be laying charges against Mazza or anyone else. That’s because not enough witnesses talked, and too many key documents had gone missing.
“The lack of accountability and transparency in the (ORNGE) business records, the variance in perspectives and the lack of co-operation of key persons involved collectively has prevented an evidence-based finding from being made,” the force says in a detailed investigative summary.
Today, Mazza works at a Mississauga sports rehabilitation and concussion clinic. At one point after the scandal, he did ER shifts at a Thunder Bay hospital.
Back in 2011, he was riding high, the president and CEO of ORNGE air ambulance, the provincially funded, orange-painted, service tasked with airlifting emergency and non-emergency patients in Ontario. $150 million a year in taxpayer funding in those days. $172 million today.
The Liberal government put him in charge in 2005 and as a Toronto Star investigation and subsequent government committee showed, the province had no checks and balances on ORNGE and the agency was allowed to do pretty much what it, and Mazza, wanted to do.
Over six years, he paid himself $9.3 million. His favourite executives took lavish, company-funded educational excursions to get their MBAs or kick the tires of business opportunities. Mazza appointed his girlfriend and water ski instructor, Kelly Long, as one of his vice-presidents and paid her well.
“First-class Chris” as he was dubbed by government critics took ORNGE-funded ski trips and business scouting trips, often with his girlfriend. Brazil, England and Italy were among their destinations, and they spent as much as $2,400 a night on accommodations.
It all came crashing down in early 2012 when a series of Star stories exposed problems at ORNGE. Mazza and all the top brass left or were fired. The board of directors, headed by Mazza’s mentor, which routinely approved the president’s requests, was replaced. Safety issues, financial problems — the new bosses set out to correct them.
The Ontario Provincial Police investigation began in February 2012.
According to a 97-page OPP report released Thursday, detectives had a tough time piercing the corporate veil. Readers of the report, available on the OPP website, will also have a hard time evaluating the report, as about 40 pages are blacked out, including one big section tantalizingly titled “First Evidence of Deceit in Amendment Three.”
The report reveals that the police spent no time looking into how money was spent or misspent. Whether a senior vice-president, Maria Renzella, should be paid $430,000 a year, and be sent to Belgium to complete the European portion of an MBA (she wrote in a social-media posting that the waffles were amazing and the chocolate “unbelievable”) was not the concern of the OPP. Government critics lambasted the Liberals for allowing this behaviour.
What the OPP zeroed in on was the allegation of a kickback. Mazza caused the non-profit, governmentfunded ORNGE to purchase $144 million (U.S.) worth of helicopters from an Italian/U.S. company, AgustaWestland. Detectives believed that ORNGE overpaid for the12 helicopters and then $4.77 million flowed back to a for-profit ORNGE company that Mazza controlled.
To investigate, detectives needed to talk to ORNGE. They drove out to ORNGE’s Mississauga offices in 2012 and poured over 713 banker’s boxes of documents the new management allowed them to see. They scrolled through thousands of emails on the ORNGE server. Some key documents were missing.
At the time, detectives believed they had “identified a potential criminal offence of misappropriation of funds involving alleged kickbacks received by ORNGE in the AW (AgustaWestland) helicopter purchase.”
The OPP asked AgustaWestland executives if they would give statements. “Their legal counsel advised they would not be participating in police witness interviews,” according to OPP documents, which explain that the helicopter executives did not like “inappropriate allegations” levelled at them by a member of an Ontario government committee probing misspending by ORNGE. The OPP asked for some documents from AgustaWestland, documents they could not find at ORNGE headquarters. In particular, they were looking for documents detail- ing “amendments” to an agreement that set out how and why the $4.77 million was being paid to the Mazza company. According to the OPP, “amendments numbered Three and Four were never provided to the OPP.” They also discovered AgustaWestland bosses also agreed to pay $2.9 million to a Mazza-created charity, the ORNGE Foundation.
Then the probe stalled. Unlike in the movies, police cannot just hop on a plane to Philadelphia or Milan (AW office locations) to interview a witness or obtain documents. Instead, the OPP had to use the Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty, a legal device that allows investigators in one country to obtain or try to obtain information in another country. That took a couple of years. By 2014, OPP detectives had visited Philadelphia and Milan.
The documents do not reveal what, if anything, two key Italian helicopter executives told the OPP when they went overseas. Giuseppe Orsi and Louis Bartolotta conducted the original negotiations with Mazza. (In January, the previously convicted Orsi was absolved by an appeals court of bribery charges in Milan related to a 2010 helicopter sale to India).
One key AgustaWestland executive in the U.S., who is identified as “Witness Number Three” in the police document, was willing to co-operate at one point in 2015. Detectives went back and forth with his or her lawyer, but then their “messages” went unanswered for months. Finally, on April 29, 2016 “the legal counsel for witness number three advised that they would not be able to assist in the OPP investigation further.” The OPP filed its final investigative report to senior officers at the provincial police force in November 2016.
Why it took so long to reveal that no charges would be laid is not explained in the document and the investigators would not agree to be interviewed by the Star on Thursday.
OPP detectives say in their report that they discovered ORNGE backdated various documents that dealt with the payment of the $4.7 million to the Mazza-controlled company. It appears that when the decision was first made to purchase the helicopters, there was no provision for money flowing back to the Mazza company. Then, amendments numbered “3” and “4” were added, but backdated to the original date. As to who did the backdating, the OPP report does not say.
After that, the OPP found, a “marketing services agreement” was created to explain what the $4.7 million covered. Previous stories by the Star revealed this money funded the creation, by Mazza’s girlfriend and vicepresident, of a small binder of marketing materials, with an eye to ORNGE eventually selling its expertise internationally.
The OPP documents list the results of interviews, or attempts to interview, Mazza and other executives. What they told police is blacked out or redacted. Detectives note that in interviewing at least some of the former ORNGE executives, contrary stories emerged, making it hard to determine what actually happened in those often wild days at ORNGE HQ out near Pearson International Airport.
In their summary, police say they considered three charges — fraud, breach of trust and misappropriation of funds, the OPP document states.
With fraud and misappropriation of funds, detectives say they found insufficient evidence, due to lack of co-operation and documentation, to support those charges.
As to breach of trust, a charge that can be laid against a public official of some sort (government official, police officer, elected official, etc.) police hit a brick wall.
When the Liberal government set up ORNGE they effectively created a private organization to do the work that was previously done by the ministry of health. Chris Mazza, as the head of ORNGE, was not a public official, police concluded.
Thursday, ORNGE revealed that after years of litigation with former president Mazza over a $500,000interest-free housing loan issued to him in 2010, in the heyday of his time at the agency, it had settled, with Mazza repaying $295,000 to ORNGE.
AgustaWestland did not respond to a request for comment. Mazza did not return a call to his clinic in Mississauga.
Ministry of Health spokesperson David Jensen said in a written statement that ORNGE has made “significant progress” in the province’s oversight of ORNGE since the scandal broke in late 2011.
He said there is more accountability and transparency at the organization.
ORNGE released a statement making similar comments, noting that ORNGE has “turned the page” on the Mazza era.
Ontario’s NDP finance critic John Vanthof said the fact that non-cooperation and poor record keeping stalled the OPP probe is “a damning condemnation of the lack of oversight and transparency in yet another Liberal privatization scheme.” Kevin Donovan can be reached at 416312-3503 or kdonovan@thestar.ca