Official toppled by expenses again

Scandal forces out two Alberta health executives

EDMON TON • Taxpayers footed the bill for fine dining, an almost $2,000 repair to a Mercedes Benz and two butlers paid at $30 an hour and yet, somehow, a senior Alberta health bureaucrat was able to transplant his free-spending ways to Ontario and back again before he was finally censured this week.

Allaudin Merali, executive vicepresident and chief financial officer with Alberta Health Services, was one of two top officials to resign this week following an expenses scandal that appeared to catch the province’s health minister by surprise.

“I’m outraged and the government is outraged by what has been revealed here,” Alberta health minister Fred Horne said Thursday.

And yet a quick search of Mr. Merali’s name shows that he was among a number of consultants named in the eHealth expense scandal in Ontario in 2009. Back then he earned $2,750 a day, plus a $75 per diem. Media reports at the time also said he cost the province $21,000 for 31 flights home to Edmonton over five months.

This week’s developments date back to expenses he racked up before moving to Ontario, when he worked for the Capital Health region, which oversaw care in the Edmonton area before the province’s health boards were amalgamated into Alberta Health Services in 2008.

Between 2005 and 2008, the bureaucrat accrued $346,208 worth of expenses, according to documents uncovered by the CBC.

Mere hours before the network was set to air the figures on Wednesday, the government announced Mr. Merali had left his position.

Sheila Weatherill, the former CEO of Capital Health, also departed her role as a board member of Alberta Health Services.

Mr. Horne said the expenses raised serious concerns about the current health board’s hiring practices and its expense policies for senior health officials.

Mr. Merali’s charges were not prohibited by the Capital Health region’s policies at the time, Mr. Horne said.

As the CEO, Ms. Weatherill signed off on Mr. Merali’s claims.

Although she resigned from the Alberta Health Services board, she defended the old health authority’s expense policies.

“Capital Health had appropriate expenditure policies that were consistent with other public sector organizations,” she wrote in her resignation letter. “Capital Health was a respected leader in healthcare nationally and internationally.”

However, Mr. Horne said expenses had become far more exacting since the boards were amalgamated.

“I’ve been assured by [Alberta Health Services] that there are processes in place today, now, that are far more stringent than what was the case under the former Capital Health Authority,” he said.

Mr. Merali’s claims included a 2005 dinner with Mr. Horne, who was neither the health minister nor an elected member of the legislature at the time.

“I was working as a health consultant at that time,” he said on Thursday. The bill totalled more than $200. “Frankly, I don’t recall the occasion, or who else may have been there.”

Mr. Merali was hired back in Alberta after his name was splashed in several Ontario newspapers during the eHealth scandal in 2009. Ontario’s attempts to digitize its health records was supposed to be a massive cost-savings measure. Instead, due to hefty consultants fees, the scheme wound up costing taxpayers $1-billion, according to the auditor general.

Mr. Horne said he was neither aware of Mr. Merali’s role in eHealth, nor could he explain how Alberta Health Services could hire as its Chief Financial Officer someone with a name as eminently Googleable as Alluadin Merali.

“I’m as much dumbfounded by this as anyone else.”

Mr. Horne said he would review the health service’s hiring practices, supported an auditor general’s probe into its expenses policies and promised all future expenses would be made public.

In the meantime, Alberta’s opposition parties said the latest scandal is no great shock.

Wildrose critic Shayne Saskiw said the health minister “admitted he didn’t know the backgrounds of senior health officials, doesn’t know the background of the expense policy in Alberta Health Services, doesn’t know the salaries of senior health officers, doesn’t know the number of vacancies on the Alberta Health Services board ... What does he know,” he asked. “It’s the same old, same old [Progressive Conservatives]... We’re seeing the same thing here with them stacking government offices with PC cronies. I don’t think anybody’s really surprised at that when you look at the history of this government.”

The details of Mr. Merali’s severance package are still under negotiation. Alberta Health Services’ acting chief executive Chris Mazurkewich told the Calgary Herald that it was standard for executives to receive the equivalent of a “one-year payout.” Although Mr. Merali has only been in the job since May and has not served a full year, his annual salary was $425,000.