RCMP probe names former OPP union leaders

In the summer of 2014, a stretch limousine arrived at the Ontario Provincial Police Association’s headquarters in Barrie, Ont., carrying two entrepreneurs: Noel Francis Chantiam, known to have a box at the Rogers Centre in Toronto where he hosted officials, and Klara Kozak, a budding travel marketer.

Andrew McKay, a prominent Toronto lawyer who specializes in representing police unions, introduced the pair to a triumvirate of officers who ran the provincial police union: Jim Christie, Karl Walsh and Martin Bain.

Chantiam pitched an idea, court documents allege. The union bosses listened.

“Francis talks fast and assumes we are as smart as he is,” Walsh later allegedly wrote in an email about the meeting.

It is then that a deal was forged to provide travel services for the association and its members, according to allegations made by the RCMP in documents filed in court.

But any alleged deal — and who might be profiting from it — would not become publicly known until concerned employees secretly told their view of things to the RCMP, and an Ontario Court judge unsealed the suspicions of federal investigators on Friday.

There are “reasonable grounds to believe,” the RCMP allege, that all of those involved at the meeting that day “acted together to commit criminal offences of fraud and theft against the OPPA.”

The travel deal, however, is only one startling allegation in the RCMP probe, with investigators saying it may have uncovered a pattern of both grand misappropriation — such as unusual condo purchases in the Bahamas and speculative investments in the Cayman Islands — as well as mundane office expenses and vacation time swindles.

Police have not made any arrests in the ongoing investigation or laid any charges and none of the allegations have been proven in court.