Charging that “an army of lawyers at Bennett Jones has been hired to defend the Government, I assume at great expense to the taxpayer,” former Alberta Health Services (AHS) CEO Athana Mentzelopoulos said in a public statement yesterday she is “worried there’s a strategy to try to bring me to my knees financially.”
Accordingly, Mentzelopoulos said in the statement sent to media the same day as the government filed its statement of defence in her $1.7-million wrongful dismissal lawsuit, she hopes “we can skip oral questions and proceed directly to trial.”
Arguably, since the allegations Mentzelopoulos made in her February 12 statement of claim have led to what the NDP Opposition has dubbed the “CorruptCare” scandal, it would be in the public interest to allow the trial to proceed speedily. So it will be interesting to see how the government responds.
Mentzelopoulos, handpicked in December 2023 to implement the United Conservative Party’s “refocusing” of public health care, was fired on Jan. 8 last year, shortly before she was scheduled to meet Alberta’s auditor-general to discuss what she has described as efforts by senior officials with ties to the UCP to pressure AHS to sign dodgy contracts.
The public first learned of her allegations in a February 5 scoop published by The Globe and Mail, that included the claim “the Premier’s then-chief of staff interfered in AHS contract negotiations.” Marshall Smith, who is no relation to his former boss, had resigned in early October 2024. A glowing farewell piece published by The Calgary Herald at the time said Smith “was asked to stay.”
In yesterday’s statement, Mentzelopoulos said she learned of the contracts from “trustworthy individuals who were concerned about potential irregularities in matters that were overseen and directed by this government.
“They put their trust in me to help restore integrity in AHS procurement processes, and I in turn put my trust in government to support work that would help ensure best value for Alberta taxpayers,” she wrote.
Bennett Jones LLP is a prominent Calgary law firm. Former UCP Premier Jason Kenney, who is not a member of the legal profession, is a senior advisor to the firm.
Mentzelopoulos’s statement of claim in February contained many bombshell allegations, including overpriced contracts, pressure from the premier’s staff to sign them, high-level conflicts of interest, and that she was fired “capriciously, arbitrarily, and in bad faith because she was actually carrying out her duties for AHS.” None of them, it must be noted, have been proved in a court of law.
In yesterday’s media statement, the former CEO said she was urged to hurry up and sign some of the contracts she was concerned about by Health Minister Adriana LaGrange herself.
“When I briefed Health Minister Adriana LaGrange on this work on December 13, 2024, I laid out what I had learned so far,” the statement said. “An internal investigation was not yet complete, and an external forensic audit had been underway for about one month.
“Minister LaGrange complained that it was taking too long for me to sign contracts for chartered surgical facilities,” the statement continued. “She said some contracts may have been ‘shitty,’ but ‘there’s a lot of shitty contracts out there in AHS and in government … and we have to live with it.’”
“The problem was that contracts we were reviewing included ones undertaken by AHS at the direction of this government, some pursuant to Minister’s directives,” Mentzelopoulos’s statement went on. “Some staff who administered these contracts would have had no choice but to follow through on those orders. I have come to understand their quandary – do what this government says or be fired, and if there are problems later with having unquestioningly executed this government’s direction, you will be held entirely accountable.”
Indeed, according to the former CEO’s conclusion, this is what happened to her. “As CEO of AHS, I came to realize that my career would end either because I went along with this government, or because I did not.”
A copy of Mentzelopoulos’s full statement is found here.
Meanwhile, less than an hour after the former CEO sent her statement to media, Justice Minister Mickey Amery posted a link to the government’s statement of defence on Elon Musk’s social media site, formerly known as Twitter.
The statement of defence, filed in the Edmonton Court of King’s Bench, begins by suggesting Mentzelopoulos is trying “to leverage her position to extract a large pay day.”
Denying there was any government interference in any AHS contracts, the statement of defence says that in her statement of claim Mentzelopoulos “presented a dramatic tale and false narrative of political persecution presumably to try and pressure AHS to offer more than she is contractually entitled to and deflect attention away from her own inadequate performance.”
At one point it accuses the CEO of calling a senior assistant deputy minister “a ‘f**king twat’.”
The government’s statement of defence also says, “The plaintiff was not fired by AHS because she commenced an investigation. She was not fired as part of a conspiracy to stop an investigation. She was fired because she failed to perform her role as president and CEO effectively and failed to carry out the mandate she was given to implement the transformation of AHS, which the premier of Alberta mandated the minister to implement.”
The statement of defence also makes the argument that since AHS was run by an independent board and not the province, “there has been no breach of contract between the Plaintiff and the Province because no such contract existed.”
The province is seeking dismissal of Mentzelopoulos’s action with costs “on a solicitor and client basis in light of the incendiary allegations made.”
A copy of the government’s statement of defence is found here. As with Mentzelopoulos’s statement of claim, none of the allegations made in the statement of defence had been proved in a court of law.
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