MONTREAL - The Auditor General for the City of Montreal is refusing to appear at a plenary session for City Council, saying he will not submit to questions without legal representation.
It's the latest twist in the spying scandal at city hall that began when Jacques Bergeron announced that the city's comptroller, Pierre Reid, was reading private email correspondence between Bergeron and his lawyers.
Bergeron made the accusations one week ago, and over the weekend submitted a 51-page report to City Council saying the comptroller had spent close to ten months surreptitiously reading emails.
Now members of opposition parties at City Hall are accusing Reid and his boss, Andre Harel, head of the city's internal audit committee, of snooping on their emails as well.
For his part Reid is scheduled to submit his report into his investigation into Bergeron to City Council on Tuesday.
That report alleges Bergeron inappropriately handed out two translation contracts totalling $5,000 to his sister-in-law, and that he should not have allowed two consultants to split their bills in order to avoid public tenders.
The leaders of Vision Montreal and Projet Montreal, Louise Harel and Richard Bergeron, say they will not accept Reid's report and are calling for his immediate resignation.
Mayor Gerald Tremblay says that as far as he is concerned, the AG needs to answer allegations of misappropriating city funds.
The opposition says those allegations involve minuscule amounts of money, and are a smokescreen for the spy scandal instigated by city bureaucrats.
NDG Borough Mayor Michael Appelbaum, who is also a member of the central city's Executive Council, says the matter has become too tainted for city hall to deal with and will be handed off to the Minister of Municipal Affairs "who will then come back with recommendation to the council concerning the procedure of how do we investigate, be elected officials, be it the ministers in the city of Montreal."
Years of conflict between AG, city administration
The clashes between Bergeron and the city administration he is tasked with inspecting have been constant.
Soon after Bergeron was named to the post of Auditor General by City Council in 2009, he delivered a scathing report into how the city had handed over the largest contract in the city's history with cost overruns, poor oversight and an inadequate bidding process.
The report prompted Mayor Gerald Tremblay to revoke the $355 million contract, and two of the city's top bureaucrats stepped down.
Bergeron then set up a hotline so concerned city staff and contractors could make complaints about irregularities without fear of reprisals, but in 2010 Tremblay transferred control of the hotline to the comptroller's department.
Reid says that it was one such anonymous tip that prompted his investigation into the Auditor General's email accounts.
