Ottawa: An Indian-origin former Ontario government employee has been sentenced to 10 years in prison after he pleaded guilty to stealing 47.4 million dollars from the Canadian provincial government that also included USD 10.8 million of the COVID aid, a media report has said.
Sanjay Madan, who served as an IT director within the Ministry of Education, agreed that he “abused his position to defraud the Ontario government” by overseeing two complicated schemes to bilk millions of dollars from taxpayers, the Global News reported on Tuesday.
“He's taking responsibility for everything. He feels sorry for his crimes,” Madan's lawyer Chris Sewratan told the newspaper.
As part of the guilty plea, Madan agreed to re-pay the entire 47 million dollars, 30 million dollars of which, his lawyers say, was immediately returned to the Ontario government, while the remainder can be repaid over the next 15 years, the report said.
The years-long deception first came to the government's attention during the COVID-19 pandemic when the government set up the support for students fund to give parents a one-time payment of 200 dollars per child to offset the costs of learning from home during the pandemic.
Madan, who had access to the internal processing portal, siphoned off more than 43,000 support payments into 2,841 bank accounts under his name — taking 10.8 million dollars from the fund.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)