'Whistleblower' cited in liquor agency store case withdraws complaint
CBC
A purported whistleblower who was said to have "alarming" evidence of "serious breaches and irregularities" at the New Brunswick Liquor Corporation now says she never made the claims attributed to her in court last year.
Stacey McKinney, a former director of finance at N.B. Liquor, says in an affidavit filed in Court of King's Bench last week that she has no information relevant to an ongoing lawsuit over the awarding of a contract for a liquor agency store in Hartland.
She says "all of the representations" made last year by her former lawyers in the case "were made without my instructions."
The New Brunswick Labour and Employment Board says in a Nov. 2 letter in the court file that McKinney recently withdrew her complaint to the board about her 2020 firing.
Last year, McKinney's lawyers said she had been fired for raising concerns about "financial, ethical and illegal irregularities" at the corporation and was seeking protection as a whistleblower under New Brunswick's Public Interest Disclosure Act.
At a hearing last November, Erica Brown, a lawyer for Hartland businessman Peter Cook, asked the court to put his lawsuit against N.B. Liquor on hold so she could gather "fresh evidence" from McKinney that "directly contradicts" the corporation's evidence.
Now McKinney says she never had anything to offer the case.
In her affidavit filed Nov. 1 in Court of King's Bench, McKinney says did not make "any allegation regarding the agency store program" in her complaint under the whistleblower law.
"I have no evidence that directly contradicts anything filed by [N.B. Liquor]" in the Hartland lawsuit, she writes.
She said she "made no representations" to Brown or to her own lawyers Christian Michaud and Joel Etienne "with respect to the award of the agency store in Hartland, New Brunswick."
Cook sued N.B. Liquor in 2021 after his lucrative contract to host an agency store in his grocery store expired and was awarded to another business in the village.
He alleged "manipulation" by N.B. Liquor in the awarding of the contract, which the corporation denied.
Brown wrote in a Nov. 1, 2021, letter to the court that she had learned "out of the blue" that McKinney and other "individuals" had evidence that "directly" contradicted what N.B. Liquor was saying in the Hartland case.
Michaud told a hearing the following week that McKinney had information about financial improprieties, misstatements in financial reports and questionable expense claims.
