During my time on the investigations team,
I have probably spent the bulk of my time on one sweeping epic.
How is it that someone who most people have never heard of, seems to have
so much influence with public office holders.
Well it's this guy, Spiros Papathanasakis.
Spiros Papathanasakis.
It all started back in 2014 when I was working with the education reporter
Caroline Alfonso, looking at some problems at the Toronto District School
Board, Canada's largest school board. So, in the course of describing those
problems which centred on, you know, various governance issues, and various
issues about the accounting, somebody said to me, one of my sources said to me,
well you really got to look at, you got to look at the big fish here, you know.
And I said okay and who is that? And this person said;
Well it's this guy, Spiros Papathanasakis.
I was working on a totally separate story that had nothing to do with this individual,
and his name came up in an interview in a
very strange way, about rumblings about organized crime and influence, and it was
one of those strange moments in the newsroom. At The Globe like we're lucky
that we work in a very collaborative environment, and three other, three
colleagues, three other reporters working on totally separate stories, had also
encountered this name on stories they were working on, Spiros Papathanasakis,
and how he seemed to be able to exert a lot of power over various government institutions.
We did a piece on, sort of the background influence of Spiros Papathanasakis
at the school board. He went on a trip to China with the
chairman and the director of education. This was an official school board trip,
and he was on this trip, nobody ever explained what he was doing there.
That story ran and then as a result of that some some tips came in, we started
getting brown envelopes saying maybe you should look at this, maybe you should
look at that. And calls came in, and then from there it just, it just, suddenly we
found ourselves going back 20 years to where it all began and that was at a hospital.
In about 1998, he was engaged in efforts
to oust the chief executive officer of Toronto East General Hospital.
That was a hospital that was just rocked by enormous governance problems.
The entire board was overthrown and lo and behold, Spiros was behind it.
And that's sort of the beginning of, as far as we've been able to trace back, the beginning of
his underground influence.
He pretty much plays the role of, like an
unregistered, underground lobbyist.
There's a lot of evidence that he was involved in lobbying on behalf of a
controversial City of Toronto contract
that was given out to a company called OMG Media. And it became a very
controversial contract when it emerged in 2003 that members of the Montreal
mafia, specifically the head of the Sicilian Mafia in Canada Vito Rizzuto,
was identified as an owner of the company.
Sometimes he's playing, he's
playing a role in maybe helping people he knows get the, get the, a competitive
edge and winning a contract and that's what happened again at the school board
with a a major solar contract, the largest solar contract ever awarded in Canada.
And sure enough, two people he's close to ended up winning that contract.
He has never been, nobody has ever officially identified him as being
behind some of it some of the problems, until now.
Somebody might wonder, why does it take, you know, one or two or three Globe and Mail
reporters this long to to write, to do this story. Well, first of all we it was,
you know, we weren't just working on that exclusively, but also some of the sources
we've talked to like, numerous times.
Predominantly what we've done is conducted a lot of interviews, because a lot of this stuff is quite historical,
and documents, whenever whenever time passes, documents are harder to come by.
We also filed numerous Freedom of Information requests, but fortunately
because we've been at this so long, like on the school board side, we've been able
to augment those Freedom of Information documents with documents that many of our
sources have also provided to us.
What his story has revealed to us is that
there is an underground system where, through word of mouth somehow, people who
on paper have nothing to do with lobbying or don't even promote
their services as lobbyists, are serving in this capacity, and it's a blind spot for the system.
Maybe it's time to hold a few more public inquiries you know,
I know people think they're time consuming and they're expensive, but maybe it's a
lot more costly to have all of these problems play out at a public
institution that is funded by taxpayers dollars.
I do hope that we can set the
record straight about about these events, because a lot of these events were
covered in the media at the time that they took place, but Spiros Papathanasakis'
name is is nowhere in the coverage. For reasons that are unclear to me he
has been able to fly under the radar in all of these events and I think that a
very influential and and critical figure in the history of
Toronto and Ontario politics has gone unnoticed as a result.