The Financial Services Commission of Ontario, not Laborers’ Int’l Union of No. Am.’s “internal reform effort,” has opened a fraud investigation into the “finances and dealings” of the Labourers’ Pension Fund of Central & Eastern Canada. LIUNA president Arthur A. Coia is one of the Fund’s 5 trustees being probed. Coia is also the Fund’s chairman. Investigators are probing a tainted 1989 land deal that the Fund paid $23.7 million for a parcel of land that is now allegedly worth $5 million. But the Fund’s books value the at $28 million. The property is in Stoney Creek, Ontario. There were purportedly plans to have condos built, but there has be no development on the land. The parcel is owned by a company that is wholly controlled by the Fund. Ontario law and LIUNA’s own conflict-of-interest rules stated that the Fund’s assets cannot be invested in a “corporation wholly owned or controlled either directly or indirectly” by any trustee. [Toronto Star 12/15/98]
