CHARLOTTETOWN, P.E.I. - The province’s infamous e-gaming scheme will once again be front and centre in a P.E.I. Supreme Courtroom today.
A team of lawyers will make arguments in a motion aimed at adding more names to a civil lawsuit filed last year against the P.E.I. government and a number of individuals over the e-gaming debacle.
John W. MacDonald, the lawyer for Capital Markets Technologies Inc. (CMT) and 7645686 Canada Inc., has amended their statement of claim, which proposes to add seven additional defendants, including former premier Robert Ghiz, deputy minister Neil Stewart, former deputy ministers Melissa MacEachern and Tracey Cutcliffe, Steven Dowling of the P.E.I. securities commission as well as private lawyers William Dow of Carr, Stevenson and MacKay and Gary Scales of McInnes Cooper.
This would bring the total number of defendants to 16.
Related: New E-gaming lawsuit filed in P.E.I. court
Jonathan Coady of Stewart McKelvey is representing the province and all defendants who were working for government at the time the e-gaming and financial transaction platform initiatives were being explored and during a subsequent securities investigation of CMT – a timeframe that spanned from 2011 to 2014.
The government has consented to the amended statement of claim and the addition of Ghiz, Stewart and MacEachern as defendants on a condition of a payment of a sum of money for legal costs.
But Gavin Tighe and Stephanie Clarke, lawyers representing Dow, Scales and Cutcliffe, are fighting the attempt to add their clients to the suit.
In documents filed in the P.E.I. Supreme Court, they point out CMT and 7645686 Canada Inc. are alleging “misfeasance in public office.”
Tighe and Clarke argue this allegation “untenable and not legally sound.”
Related: P.E.I.'s infamous e-gaming lawsuit struck out
Tighe and Clarke will ask today to have Dow, Scales and Cutcliffe removed from the amended statement of claim. They will further argue that if the judge does permit them to be added to the suit, that CMT post $350,000 in security for costs for their expected legal fees to the end of the pretrial stage of proceedings. They estimate their total costs will be in excess of $1.2 million.
CMT has already posted $732,098 in security for costs for the statement of claim filed in March 2017.
Meanwhile, MacDonald and CMT have filed hundreds of pages of documents in court to support their motion application.
This 724-page record with 100 exhibits includes a timeline of events, as presented in an affidavit by CMT’s Paul Maines, from 2010 to 2017 of all dealings between CMT and the named defendants, complete with email exchanges, Hansard transcripts and even the auditor general’s 2016 special report on e-gaming.
CMT is seeking over $50 million in damages.
