Consultant makes intervener pitch

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 13/03/2010 (5876 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The Manitoba Hydro whistleblower asked the Public Utilities Board Friday to make a civil court case against her disappear — or at least help cover her legal costs.

And, because her whistleblower complaint has dragged on for 15 months, she needs time — and $50,000 — to refresh her memory of the technical details of her allegations prior to the start of a huge regulatory hearing later this year.

"I am not able, for commercial reasons, to just stop what I am doing and just donate free pro-bono time," said the New York-based risk consultant. "If I am going to be under the firing squad and facing some very hard questions, I want to be completely back up to speed."

The whistleblower’s identity is protected by a publication ban and she was allowed to speak to the PUB Friday without revealing her name or her company’s name.

During Friday’s unusual PUB hearing, the whistleblower asked for intervener status in the upcoming mega-hearing on power rates. Intervener status would allow the New York consultant to walk the PUB through her allegations, submit evidence, make arguments and call witnesses — including Manitoba Hydro staff.

But the PUB’s process is tangled up in a related court case involving many of the same secret risk reports that suggest Hydro lost $1.1 billion in the last five years and could face bankruptcy and rolling blackouts.

Hydro has sued the whistleblower in the Court of Queen’s Bench to force her to allow a detailed public airing of her findings. Hydro has hired another consultant, KPMG, to scrutinize her reports, and Hydro wants to be allowed to release the KPMG report to outside investigators, the PUB and the public. The whistleblower has insisted her reports remain secret because they contain confidential information that could damage her business interests.

During Friday’s hearing, the whistleblower appeared via telephone and said she can’t devote her time to both the PUB hearing and the court case, which she said is only an attempt to exhaust her resources and damage her credibility.

She asked the PUB to find a way to end the lawsuit — something Public Utilities Board members quickly said they do not have the power to do.

The whistleblower is also asking the PUB for financial aid worth between $300,000 and $800,000 to help defray the cost of participating in the hearing. The money would not go to her directly, but cover lawyers’ expenses.

Lawyers for Manitoba Hydro said it’s "unheard of" to ask the PUB to cover legal fees for an outside court case.

Hydro also objected to granting the whistleblower intervener status at the upcoming rate hearing, saying the PUB shouldn’t get enmeshed in a "he-said-she-said” battle between Hydro and the whistleblower over things that simply aren’t relevant to the rate application.

Surprisingly, most of the other regular interveners agreed. Lawyers representing seniors groups, consumer advocates, environmentalists and large power users all said the whistleblower doesn’t represent a cross-section of ratepayers whose views ought to be heard.

Byron Williams, the lawyer representing seniors and consumer advocates, said he feared the meaty issue of Hydro’s risk levels could get hijacked by attempts to redeem or undermine professional credibility.

"The clearing of one’s professional name is not sufficient to establish one as an intervener," he said.

Nor did the PUB appear overly sympathetic to the whistleblower’s request for intervener status, suggesting instead that the PUB send two of its own independent risk experts to New York to interview her and study her reports instead of asking her to testify and call evidence.

maryagnes.welch@freepress.mb.ca

Whistleblower replies

Late last month, as part of a civil court case, Manitoba Hydro tabled a damning affidavit from one of its senior executives that detailed Hydro’s relationship with the New York consultant.

In it, power sales and operations manager David Cormie painted her as an unprofessional lone wolf who was in over her head, had a deeply flawed understanding of Hydro’s operations, overstepped the scope of her contract and kept trying to sell Hydro her proprietary software. Emails she sent to Hydro staff joked about wishing the company’s current risk manager would commit suicide.

In response, the whistleblower circulated a 36-page letter earlier this week that will likely form the crux of her formal response in court. Here are some excerpts:

"It was Hydro’s employees who in many cases invoked such jovial comments and it was meant to be a humorous attempt to make light of a very stressful situation… It was nothing more than idle banter and tomfoolery in the office between friends… I do want to reassert that no ill will was intended in any form."

"Both the CFO and the CEO at numerous times provided validation and agreement on the issues I had raised… My work was well regarded, well respected and highly praised by my line manager and the CFO. This was also indicated by the many contract renewals…

"I was receiving direct communications from Hydro employees that the risk issues I was raising (such as blackouts, reliability failures, computer problems and financial forecast errors, losses in the millions due to the negligence by Cormie) were not being reviewed properly by Hydro and that (Hydro president and CEO Bob Brennan) himself was sweeping them under the rug."

"I believe Hydro has run a campaign of intimidation and ridicule to prevent employees who have and can testify to the accuracy of my work."