More fuel on the senate scandal fire as the RCMP have filed new court documents seeking information about a number of expense claims Pamela Wallin made that may not have related to senate business. The total amount of expenses allegedly improperly claimed? $25,567.
I certainly don’t think improperly claiming expenses is appropriate behaviour but still, $25,567 seems such small potatoes and is undoubtedly a lot less than the amount of money the RCMP is spending on the matter. So scandal just doesn’t seem the appropriate word to use.
Now France knows how to do scandals. When I spent time there in the spring of 2013 the news was all about the Bernard Tapie affair. It wasn’t just the amount – almost 400 million Euros related to the sale by Tapie of Adidas -- that made this a true scandal, it was also the players.
Tapie himself had owned sports teams, had been in government, and had spent time in jail for match-fixing. But when he felt he was wronged by French bank Credit Lyonnais who represented him on the sale of Adidas (and then flipped the company for twice the price) then French president Nicolas Sarkozy intervened to help his friend get the money back, as did current International Monetary Fund chief Christine Lagarde, so the allegations go. So big names and big money. Now that’s a scandal.
More on Canada’s mini-scandal will be coming out soon as the allegations against senator Mike Duffy go to court April 7.
Almost scandalous is smart people’s stupid use of social media. The latest self-inflicted victim is Rory Cullinan, now a former executive with Royal Bank of Scotland. Cullinan was so successful he was the only RBS executive expected to get a bonus. Unfortunately, Cullinan also liked to snapchat with his daughter and some of those snapchats made it into the The Sun newspaper. The snapchats were selfies with messages like “boring meeting” and “not a fan of board meetings.”
Kind of sweet that he was snapchatting with his daughter which is a lot better than most of the really embarrassing tweets we’ve heard about in the past. It still led to Cullinan stepping down though.
In other news, Google has failed to dismiss a lawsuit alleging it is providing personal information of its Google Wallet electronic payment users with outside app developers. The company is also in a spat with China over refusing to accept China’s security certification for Chinese websites.
And Walmart has taken a stance in favour of gay rights and McDonald’s has raised wages. Really.
