Ottawa:
A former Ontario government official of Indian descent has been sentenced to 10 years in prison after pleading guilty to stealing $47.4 million from Canada’s provincial government, including $10.8 million in COVID relief, a media report said.
Sanjay Madan, who served as IT director at the Department of Education, agreed that he “used his position to defraud the Ontario government” by overseeing two convoluted schemes to collect millions of dollars from taxpayers Global News reported Tuesday.
“He takes responsibility for everything. He feels sorry for his crimes,” Madan’s lawyer Chris Sewratan told the newspaper.
As part of the guilty plea, Madan agreed to repay the full $47 million, of which $30 million, his lawyers say, was immediately returned to the Ontario government, with the remainder to be repaid over the next 15 years. report said.
The years-long deception first came to government attention during the COVID-19 pandemic when the government created the Student Support Fund to provide parents with a one-time payment of $200 per child to offset the cost of home learning during the pandemic.
Madan, who had access to the internal processing portal, funneled more than 43,000 support payments into 2,841 bank accounts under his name, taking $10.8 million from the fund.
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