Manitoba Liquor and Lotteries has filed a lawsuit against a former employee, sentenced to house arrest in March for defrauding the Crown corporation, and is seeking hundreds of thousands of dollars more than the court ordered her to pay back.
Lori Mann, in her mid 50s, pleaded guilty to one count of fraud over $5,000 and was sentenced to 14 months of house arrest.
Mann was co-ordinator of tours and group sales at MLL from 2017 to 2019. She adjusted computer records to reflect higher passenger numbers for bus tour contractor Tony’s Team Transport, which benefited the company by $52,600, court was told.
In a lawsuit, filed in the Court of King’s Bench by lawyers Dean Giles and Alexa Smith on Sept. 27, her former employer seeks a judgment of $235,885, or alternatively, damages to be proven at trial. It’s also seeking aggravated, exemplary or punitive damages, interest and legal costs.
Mann’s sentence included an order she pay MLL $40,000 in restitution, which a Crown prosecutor told court represented part of the Crown corporation’s insurance deductible.
That amount has been deducted from the damages the corporation is seeking in its lawsuit, the court filing says.
She was responsible for organizing casino tours from Winnipeg that were contracted with third-party companies, greeting patrons, counting the number of people on tours, and inputting data into the Crown corporation’s system, the court filing says.
“The plaintiff placed its trust and confidence in the defendant that, in the course of completing her duties, she would use her access to information and relationship with third-party tour operators for proper purposes and not for her personal benefit,” reads the court filing.
Mann owed the Crown corporation a duty of fidelity and loyalty and duty to act in good faith, in MLL’s best interests, the court filing claims, but she breached the duty by misappropriating funds.
The Crown corporation alleges Mann influenced tour operators into falsifying invoices and giving her kickbacks to guarantee they would receive contracts with MLL. The filing says she added names to passenger manifests, edited passenger numbers, and inputted cancelled, duplicated or faked tours, all of which resulted in over payments.
Manitoba Liquor and Lotteries was alerted to Mann’s conduct in April 2019, leading her to be placed on leave, before resigning.
“It was only after the defendant resigned from her employment that, through the completion of forensic investigation, the plaintiff discovered the extent of the defendant’s unlawful misappropriation, conversion of funds and other fraudulent activity,” the statement of claim alleges.
Crown prosecutor Terry McComb told court during Mann’s criminal proceedings this year there were shortcomings with the Crown corporation’s record-keeping, oversight and its own internal investigation. Her sentence came as the result of plea bargain that took those facts into account.
Court heard there was no evidence Mann benefited financially by altering the computer records.
In comments to the court in March, Mann suggested she altered the passenger figures in good faith, believing they accurately reflected the number of people on the buses, but she did not “investigate” to confirm.
Her lawyer told court she had been struggling with family and mental-health challenges, when in 2017 her job responsibilities expanded to include managing the payment of tour operators.
A business Mann owns, Maple Bus Lines, has been hit with a number of lawsuits over alleged unpaid loans and services.
erik.pindera@freepress.mb.ca
Erik Pindera
Reporter
Erik Pindera is a reporter for the Free Press, mostly focusing on crime and justice. The born-and-bred Winnipegger attended Red River College Polytechnic, wrote for the community newspaper in Kenora, Ont. and reported on television and radio in Winnipeg before joining the Free Press in 2020. Read more about Erik.
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