I'm sorry. So that's Mr. Crupi. Mr. Crupi's boss at the time was Chief Superintendent Yves Bouchard, whose boss at the time was Jim Ewanovich, and then it was also signed by a procurement representative, who was then Inspector Guy Rochette.
What happened? We don't actually know exactly what happened here. There were very poor memories around this event. What we do know for sure is that two people from NCPC took an agreement to then Deputy Commissioner Lange, who was the chair of the insurance committee. Mr. Lange signed an agreement that basically committed the RCMP to $6.3 million, to be paid out over eight fiscal years to cover the cost of the insurance, and 40% of those costs would be taken out of the pension.
When it came to the procurement office, they decided not to send it to legal. They decided that Mr. Crupi had signed on the line, therefore he had ostensible authority. I learned the word “ostensible” much like I learned the word “fulsome”. It was new to me, but I became intimate with it. Ostensible authority, as it was explained to me, was that nobody from outside could tell that Mr. Crupi wasn't a bona fide representative of the RCMP and therefore they wouldn't question that he could sign this contract, therefore the RCMP would be liable, so they had to pay these bills.
You heard evidence before this committee that that was the interpretation of our chief financial officer. The truth of the matter is that the bills came from Great-West Life. As we've heard, Great-West Life did no work. They were merely the conduit for payment. Had anybody picked up the phone, had anybody done any checks whatsoever—“due diligence” is definitely the term here—they would have found out exactly what I found out, and believe me, I'm no financial or procurement expert.
The bills were paid. This was September 2003. You've heard evidence that as soon as finance knew about it, they had to pay the initial bill but immediately they put an end to it and made it all better.
The evidence is also that the moneys weren't paid back to the pension until March 2005, after the investigation found it and made it quite an issue. I'll leave it to you to draw your conclusions, but a year and a half seems to be a long time to continue paying bills that you believe shouldn't be paid.
Just give me a moment to catch up to myself.
Of note, something I skimmed over here, when Shawn Duford had written out the briefing note talking about Mr. Crupi's issues, Mr. Crupi obviously wasn't too concerned, as a week later he wrote to his boss saying that he needed a promotion, that because of all his responsibilities, he should be bumped from an EX-01 to an EX-02.