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Latest Leak
Released on November 02, 2013, 11:00 AM EDT
Tag #: 662
Authoritarianism: City in crisis
Another
conspiracy by City’s bureaucrats exposed
City did not submit original of fake affidavit to the court
  
Bureaucrats
behind the conspiracy
From left: Benkovich: Controversial practices, Fowke: Incompetent
and negligent, Canapini: Bad legal advice
City’s
bureaucrats failed in their attempt to prevent public access to the
secret contract documents. “Gravy-obsessed” bureaucrats
maliciously attempted to prosecute a Sudbury resident who requested
City’s contract documents under the Freedom of Information and
Protection of Privacy Act. The City alleged that the fake affidavit
was utilized to collect after-hours water operation monitoring
service contract documents. The case was heard on October 10, 2013
in the Sudbury Ontario Court of Justice and the prosecutor had to
drop all of the criminal charges (fraud under $ 5,000, false
affidavit, uttering document) due to lack of sufficient and
convincing evidence. The fraud under $ 5,000 charge, had to be
dropped even before the start of the hearing.
City denied access to the records
The City denied access to the
contract documents and to the amount of tax dollars paid to the
contractor for after-hours monitoring services for the water and
wastewater division. The matter was appealed to the Office of the
Information and Privacy Commissioner. We successfully defended our
actions and won the appeal. The matter was mediated and the Office
of the Information and Privacy Commissioner ordered the City to
disclose the records. WikiLeaks Sudbury uncovered details concerning
a large amount of tax dollars scammed and misspent by divisional
director Nick Benkovich. The invoice was directly e-mailed to
Benkovich and was paid in full with tax dollars. WikiLeaks Sudbury
expects to release more information to the public about the Water
and Wastewater division after-hour monitoring contract.
City hired "Google" detective, Cynthia White:
Andrew Williams
Kristen Newman, Assistant
City Solicitor, complained to the Greater Sudbury Police Services
about an alleged fake affidavit that was submitted to the City’s
clerk office. The complaint also concerned the collection, by a
third person, of the contract documents belonging to the after-hour
monitoring service of the water and wastewater division. Newman
"nominated" the suspect and coordinated with detective
Andrew Williams of the Greater Sudbury Police Services resulting in
the arrest that has now been made. WikiLeaks Sudbury uncovered a
series of e-mails of communication between Newman and Williams. In
them, Williams wrote to Newman stating that “as far as documents
are concerned, all is in order. Now, we need will-statement to
fabricate charges.”
Furthermore
Williams intruded into various Sudbury residents’ Facebook and
Twitter accounts through Cynthia White, who maliciously attempted to
collect evidence to plot against the Sudbury resident that requested
the records. In this way, Williams invaded their privacy. Newman
attempted to mislead the court, suggesting that the original
requester of the records was posing as other freedom of information
requesters, and thus attempted to prevent the release of information
to public. Their attempt has been defeated and over 100 individuals
voluntarily agreed to testify before the court against the City’s
bureaucrats. This includes City staff, officers and employees.
Crown attempted to settle the issue outside
of the court
Prosecutors exercised many
offers expecting an out-of-court settlement. Since the matter has an
important public interest, we decided to continue the proceedings to
defeat the conspiracy.
No original of fake affidavit was submitted
to the court
The dramatic change in the
City’s position occurred at the hearing. The City did not submit
the so-called fake affidavit for defence examination. Now it is
clearly evident that the creation of the fake affidavit is an
“inside job”. Canapini, leading City’s legal service
department and Fowke, leading the Human Resource division,
well-coordinated all of their actions. Now it can be concluded that
the stamp used on the fake affidavit was in circulation between both
departments.
Complainant, Assistant City Solicitor
Kristen Newman, did not appear before the court to testify
City solicitor Jamie
Canapini’s close ally, Newman, who lodged the complaint to the
Greater Sudbury Police Service regarding the fake affidavit, never
appeared before the court to testify. This unusual move is clear
evidence behind the conspiracy of the City’s bureaucrats. The
City’s bureaucrats were unable to stand against stiff resistance
from the defence team and ran away from justice.
Fowke’s final and last attempt to keep the
public in the dark failed
Kevin Fowke, director of
Human Resources and Organizational Development, sent his close ally,
Relief director of Human Resources, Karen Matthies, to the court to
testify. Karen Matthies attempted to connect an envelope in her
possession with the fake affidavit. However Matthies was not able to
take a stand since the conspiracy had been exposed immediately
during cross examination of deputy City clerk, Lisa Miller. Miller
told the court she cannot recall any documents that were collected
in relation to a fake affidavit and also cannot recall any fees paid
to collect the records.
Crown attempted to adjoin the proceedings
The prosecutor attempted to
adjoin the proceedings stating that new evidence had emerged. The
defence team then objected to the prosecutor’s witnesses’ and
their evidence’s credibility and reliability. Due to the strong
objection from the defence team, the inclusion of new evidence was
not permitted and the proceedings continued.
Finally the conspiracy exposed
Later, the prosecutor had to
drop all criminal charges and engaged in damage control on behalf of
the City’s corrupted bureaucrats. The prosecutor said there is no
public interest to continue the trial. The prosecutor also told the
court he knew what evidence will be presented to the court.
According
to sources available to WikiLeaks Sudbury, City’s top bureaucrats
may face moral corruption and breach of trust charges for the
misspending of tax dollars.
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Related articles:
--------------------------------------End
Editorial
Released on November 02, 2013 at 11:00 AM EDT
The
original article initially published on PhD thesis,
Joseph
L. Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto.. Excerpts from the article as follows.
Moral Disengagement in Processes of
Organizational Corruption
Corruption
is a particularly muddy concept, in large part because it is very broad
and inclusive of a wide variety of actions and/or behaviours, which makes
establishing a clear definition difficult. There are many forms of
corruption as well, which span multiple levels of analysis, ranging from
corruption narrowly tied to an individual (such as someone who,
contravening organizational norms, misuses their position for self-serving
reasons), to organizational corruption (such as when the goals and/or
norms of the organization are dependent on illegal or unethical actions,
and have some form of official sanction). While there is by no means a
consensus view of organizational corruption, the following definition of
organizational corruption in mind: unethical actions undertaken
in accordance with organizational goals, which are likely to—but
do not necessarily—directly or indirectly advance
individual interests as well.
Why
focus on a definition of organizational corruption that highlights actions
taken to advance organizational interests? Clearly, much of the behaviour
that can be considered corrupt works against organizational interests: for
example, theft and embezzlement, inappropriate use of funds or benefits,
or misuse of one's personal position for individual gain. Advancing one's
own interests is clearly a motivating factor in certain types of
organizational corruption, and moral disengagement may well play a role in
explaining such behaviour. However, this type of behaviour cannot
accurately be called "sanctioned organizational corruption," as
Brief and his colleagues describe; it is more accurately identified as
individual organizational corruption, since it directly undermines
organizational goals. "Sanctioned organizational corruption" has
to be comprised of actions which advance, at least in the short term,
corporate goals. Finally, it is important to specify why individual self
interest is a probable, but not necessary, part of the definition of
organizational corruption which drove the theorizing behind this work. It
is possible to understand "organizational interests" in many
ways, some of which dovetail quite nicely at the individual level with
self interest. Self interest is therefore a key component of corporate or
organizational corruption.
Unethical
behaviours which advance organizational interests are often clearly in an
individual's self interest as well. However, as I hope to make clear in
this chapter, moral disengagement facilitates unethical behaviour both
within one's interests, as well as outside one's interests. In both cases,
moral disengagement helps dampen moral awareness, and therefore makes
individuals less cognizant of ethical issues when they arise. This will
facilitate both blatant self interest, as well as a general indifference
towards the ethical implications of one's actions. Moral disengagement is
therefore going to facilitate unethical decision making both in cases
where it does not directly serve the individual's interest, as well as in
cases where it does. The measure of moral disengagement was then related
to other constructs of interest, and behaved in expected ways, correlating
positively with Machiavellianism, psychopathy, and social dominance
orientation, and negatively with moral identity, empathy, pro-social value
orientation, and cognitive moral development. None of the correlations
were of sufficient magnitude to suggest that the measure of moral
disengagement was redundant with other constructs.
Albert
Bandura's theory of moral disengagement was developed to explain why
certain people are able to engage in inhumane conduct without apparent
distress. In his theory, individuals with high levels of moral
disengagement become habituated to using cognitive mechanisms which work
to suspend the self-regulatory processes that socio-cognitive theory
suggests govern individual moral behaviour. To date, the work on moral
disengagement has remained primarily theoretical, used in explanations of
political and military violence. The empirical work on moral disengagement
has taken place predominantly in the context of predicting aggression and
anti-social behaviour in children and adolescents.
How
does moral disengagement work? Bandura's theory suggests that
disengagement operates through eight different cognitive mechanisms, which
can be grouped into three basic types. Three of these mechanisms (moral
justification, euphemistic labelling, and advantageous comparison)
facilitate the cognitive restructuring of inhumane acts so that they
appear less harmful to the individual engaged in them; the cognitions work
by making the inhumane act seem beneficial in some way. For example, moral
justification might involve telling oneself that selectively
disclosing product information to customers is critical to protecting the
company's public image. Similarly, euphemistic labelling renames
harmful actions so as to appear benign.
Two
cognitive mechanisms (displacement of responsibility and diffusion of
responsibility) minimize the role of the individual in the harm that is
caused by their actions. Cognitions which displace responsibility tend
to attribute responsibility for one's actions to authority figures who may
have tacitly condoned or explicitly directed one's behaviour. Cognitions
which diffuse responsibility tend to disperse blame across members
of a group, rather than attributing it to any one individual. For example,
research on the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster reveals that diffusion
of responsibility was an important factor in the decision to launch.
The
final three cognitive mechanisms (distortion of consequences,
dehumanization and attribution of blame) refrarne the effects of one's
actions, either by minimizing the outcomes of those actions or by
minimizing the perception of distress those actions cause others. Unlike
the first three mechanisms, these are not intended to refrarne the
activity in a positive light; rather, they work on minimizing the true
consequences that one's actions have on others. In the context of
organizational corruption, the distortion of consequences is
abetted by calling such criminal activity "victimless" or by
downplaying the ultimate effects of the activity. Together, these eight
mechanisms restructure the way that individuals make decisions and
experience the choices they make. Although each mechanism describes a cognitive
process which facilitates disengagement of the self-sanctions that
socio-cognitive theory claims drive individual moral behaviour, moral
disengagement can also manifest within individuals as a generalized cognitive
orientation to the world, which differentiates one individual from
another. In Bandura's theory, moral disengagement describes both a
set of processes that individuals employ to disengage moral self
sanctions, and a way of differentiating individuals by the degree to which
they have made habitual their dependence on these mechanisms (in a way
that influences their behaviour).
The
influence of context on moral disengagement is also an open question.
Research on business ethics has been quite consistent in finding that
individuals segment their moral lives, applying different set of ethical
standards in different contexts.
Editor
WikiLeaks Sudbury
November 02, 2013
Editor
WikiLeaks Sudbury
November 02, 2013
Reference
and excerpts
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