Wed., 12:00 AM 6:00 AM
SWSDA audit still underway.
Wednesday, July 4th 2012
A forensic audit into the South West Shore Development Authority is nearing completion.
It's been almost ten months since the Nova Scotia government announced the audit.
Jennifer Gavin with the provincial department of economic and rural development and tourism tells CJLS she can't give a timeframe as to when the audit would be finished.
Percy Paris, the minister of economic and rural development and tourism, said recently he has been after staff at least every other day about the audit into the South West Shore Development Authority.
The province announced last September that it would conduct a forensic audit into the authority, specifically to learn what happened to money given to the agency and why so many creditors were never paid.
Paris said at the time the audit would get to the bottom of what went on at the authority.
The authority went under in 2010, leaving dozens of unsecured creditors owed a total of $2,324,805.80.
Grant Thornton LLP, a trustee, began discussions with creditors in July 2011 about how the former agency would liquidate its assets and what the likelihood was of creditors ever seeing any of their money again.
Creditors accepted a proposal on Sept. 15 in which one of the former agency’s few remaining assets, a former Shelburne County film studio, was to be auctioned off.
The agency’s former chief executive officer would also be entitled to money now in a pension plan, including $70,348 the authority paid into a pension fund from 2007 to 2010, the trustee told creditors.
The province was listed as the only secured creditor, claiming it was owed $475,000 for a mortgage on an authority project that failed.
Last November, the former CFS Shelburne military installation, which the agency owned and was assessed at more than $2.8 million, sold at auction for $125,000.
The new owner, a Yarmouth contractor, had to pay $48,442.58 in back taxes, along with the harmonized sales tax and a 1 per cent municipal deed transfer tax.
Six additional waterfront lots went for $85,000 in total.
One of those anxiously waiting for the release of the audit is Garian Construction of Yarmouth which is owed approximately 367-thousand dollars for its work on the community centre at École secondaire de Par-en-Bas.
Garian was the general contractor.
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