Former head of NLC pays back $3K reimbursed for travel expenses: AG report
The former CEO of the Newfoundland and Labrador Liquor Corporation has paid back $3,150 in travel expenses after the auditor general found he was reimbursed for improper expense claims.
Auditor General Julia Mullaley also questioned why Steve Winter needed to go on expensive European trips for the Crown corporation in the first place.
"The necessity and benefit associated with the related travel expenses is not clear given the poor performance of the futures program," she wrote in her report, released Thursday.
The report looked at the NLC's fine wines program, which saw the corporation buy $15 millions' worth of expensive Bordeaux wines. It was a program run by Winter, who made all the decisions about which wines to buy, and at what to price to sell them.
The auditor general found the corporation now has tens of thousands' worth of bottles of expensive wine it has discounted in an effort to recoup its investment
Winter insists the plan was to hang on to these rare wines and sell them on the world market when they went up in value, bringing in new revenue for the corporation.
In total NLC spent $170,610 on travel and entertainment for the fine wine program. Most of that was for trips to Europe, sometimes multiple times a year. Sometimes several NLC employees went; other times Winter went alone to visit vineyards and to attend industry events.
During her audit, Mullaley found Winter submitted one expense twice. In another instance, four nights of hotel rooms that he was reimbursed for by the liquor corporation were also reimbursed to his personal credit card.
The most expensive trip was for three people to visit Vinexpo in France in 2009. Three people went on the trip at a cost of $30,000.
Mullaley noted flights were sometimes in business class, even though that violated NLC's policies.
"NLC did not always manage the travel expenditures incurred in relation to specialty wines in a manner that promoted the appropriate use of public money," she wrote in her report.
The report said Winter, who was fired as CEO in 2018, paid back the $3,150 earlier this month.
Finance Minister Tom Osborne said last week that concerns over the fine wine program were one of the reasons for removing Winter, but no cause was announced at the time.
NLC paid for son's travel costs
The report highlighted concerns about Steve Winter making the decision to buy specialty wines through his son's company, but a look at travel expenses found NLC covered some of his travel costs as well.
In 2013 Greg Winter, who ran his own wine agency business, stayed at a hotel room paid for by NLC. On another trip, in 2016, he stayed in a hotel room that NLC wasn't using, costing the corporation $2,079. NLC officials only caught it four months after the event.
Greg Winter told CBC News that even before he took the room he agreed to pay for it, and provided his credit card immediately after he returned but the NLC didn't put the charge through until months later.
He said the auditor general never actually spoke to him for her report. He insists he never even went on the trip in 2013, so couldn't have taken a free hotel room — he was at home with a new child.
In an email to CBC, Greg Winter disputed Mullaley's findings.
"The AG's report is one-sided, narrow-minded and was created with information hand-fed to her by [interim NLC CEO] Sharon Sparkes with Tom Osborne leaning over her shoulder the whole time to ensure the report was written in a way to embarrass my father and I," he wrote.
"Sparkes and Osborne are guilty of an absolute abuse of power to settle personal vendettas."
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