A former chief administrative officer with the City of Winnipeg is being asked at a public inquiry why he met with and emailed a contractor about a major redevelopment project.<\/p>\n
A civil court earlier found Phil Sheegl accepted a bribe from an executive with Caspian Construction, which won the bid for most of the work converting a former post office building into the new headquarters for the Winnipeg Police Service.<\/p>\n
The project ran more than $70 million over budget by the time it was completed in 2016, and the inquiry is looking into what happened.<\/p>\n
The inquiry\u2019s lead lawyer asked Sheegl on Tuesday about a meeting he had with the executive before the contract was awarded.<\/p>\n
Sheegl says he doesn\u2019t remember what was discussed but that, in retrospect, meeting one potential bidder without the others present was \u201cprobably not right.\u201d<\/p>\n
He was also asked about emails he sent to Caspian after the company and others complained the city was asking for too high a performance bond to bid on the work.<\/p>\n
Sheegl says he and others at city hall wanted the contract open to as many bidders as possible in order to get a good price.<\/p>\n
The bond was lowered soon after.<\/p>\n
Sheegl has denied accepting a bribe. He said money he received from the Caspian executive was for an unrelated land deal in Arizona. The judge in the civil case said that explanation was \u201cfictional.\u201d<\/p>\n
RCMP investigated but no charges were laid.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A former chief administrative officer with the City of Winnipeg is being asked at a public inquiry why…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":481624,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[194296],"tags":[49,48,22073],"class_list":["post-481623","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-winnipeg","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-winnipeg"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/481623","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=481623"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/481623\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/481624"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=481623"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=481623"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=481623"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}