The Surly Beaver has an interesting story of ACOA gone tragically wrong.
You see, Mike Gaffney used to be the President and CEO of Learnsoft Corporation, a company based in Kanata Ontario. In September 1999, a virtual university was founded in Fredericton, New Brunswick to grant “E-MBA’s.” The university was given $600,000 in taxpayers money - $375,000 from Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency and $225,000 from Human Resources Development Canada. This private, for-profit university was and is a subsidiary of Learnsoft Corporation. Sometime later, Mike Gaffney sold his shares in Learnsoft for - you guessed it - $600,000.
So lets recap. Michael Gaffney, son of a Liberal MP, Ontario resident and President of a company headquartered in Ontario, applies for and gets a grant from a among others, a federal funding agency whose purpose is to support businesses in Atlantic Canada. He then sells his share in the company for a tidy profit.
3 comments:
This Gaffney character is also a current Liberal candidate in the riding of Nepean-Carleton.
So much for ACOA helping "improve the earned income of Atlantic Canadians" (from ACOA's website)
In this case tax dollars directly helped a central Canadian - to the tune of $600 K.
Purely, this is just another Fiberal laying a claim to his "entitlement". This is the culture and we all know that "cultures" grow.
Bob L'Heureux
Don't let the facts get in the way of Politics.
Learnsoft is a Publicly traded company, whose records can be viewd at http://www.sedar.com/DisplayCompanyDocuments.do?lang=EN&issuerNo=00013134
He started the company in 1996, owned 18,454,293 shares when the company went public on the Vancouver Stock exchange at $0.20. These shares were worth $3,690,858.60 when they topped out at over $2.00 they were worth $36,908,586.00 so...the guy sold shares for $600,000 big deal.
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