Cusimano won’t face charges
In a unanimous decision from the city’s compliance audit committee, former council candidate Gus Cusimano will not face prosecution for campaign finance violations.
“I’m satisfied with the result,” Cusimano said afterwards, referring all questions to his lawyer Jack Siegel.
Siegel said that while the audit unearthed a handful of problems, this is to be expected in any large campaign.
“There were minor contraventions that were admitted to. And I’d suggest that it’s all but impossible for a candidate to run a campaign on a City of Toronto scale — even at a ward level — and not have some minor contraventions,” he said, adding Cusimano “regrets the errors.”
Aforensic audit of the Ward 9 candidate’s 2010 campaign expenses found several instances in which Cusimano’s team seemed to breach the Municipal Elections Act. The most serious relates to seven cheques that appeared to have been altered so as to qualify for a fundraising deadline.
In a written submission, Siegel said “the changes to the cheques were more likely than not to have been made by Rob Davis than by Mr. Cusimano.”
Davis, a former city councillor, worked as a fundraiser on the campaign.
Speaking outside committee afterwards, Siegel said the fact that Cusimano turned the faulty cheques over in the first place speaks to his innocence.
“If you’d done something like that or had any idea that somebody else had, on first request would you just turn them over?”
Davis vehemently denied he committed “fraud.”
“I gave them to him. He made copies at his office. He gave me a copy of them. And that was the extent of my responsibility. So something, obviously, something happened to them between the times I handed them to him, he copied them and he deposited them in the bank. Who did that, I’ll leave you to draw your own conclusions, but it certainly wasn’t me,” Davis said.
In the October 2010 election, Cusimano lost to incumbent Councillor Maria Augimeri by 89 votes. Cusimano challenged the results in court, although an appeals court upheld Augimeri’s victory.