'Secret' NOFG report shows Quebec owners planned to invest elsewhere

Yet another secret NOFG report surfaced at a public accounts committee meeting Wednesday (Feb. 18) as it continues its probe into the $4-million loss of provincial money in the (Prince Edward) Islands former pork-processing plant.

Several internal, secret reports and addendums to reports have been trickling out of the hands of MLAs at public accounts for several weeks.

This newest report, marked as a confidential information memorandum, contains the marketing and business strategy of the Quebec-owned Natural Organic Food Group Inc. (NOFG).

It includes a plan by the Quebec owners to buy out the PEI partners holdings in the company. It also discusses plans to build a new pork-processing plantone that would not necessarily be built on PEI.

MLA Charlie McGeoghegan, who brought this report forward Wednesday, said he views this information as shocking.

(The Quebec owners) didnt put one penny into Garden Province Meats for NOFG in Charlottetown here on MacAleer Drive, not one penny for the $2.8 (million) in repairs for that, McGeoghegan said during Wednesdays public accounts meeting.

If anything, this report shows they were going to take the value-added process off of PEI.

PEIs former pork-processing plant was called into receivership in December 2007 when the province called in a loan the plant owners could not pay. It closed its doors permanently last March.

The provinces auditor general investigated the plants finances and operations and found the plant was doomed from the start when the Quebec-owned NOFG, partnered with PEI Pork Plus, took over the Garden Province Meats plant, formerly owned and operated by Maple Leaf.

In his audit of the NOFG plant, Auditor General Colin Younker is highly critical of the millions in loans advanced to the company by government, despite $2.8 million in repairs that was needed but never supplied by NOFG.

Without this capital financing, the plant bled money until it was finally called into receivership.

But this newly acquired report, dated November 2007, shows the Quebec owners of NOFG were in the process of raising as much as $10 millionbut not for the capital expenses required for their PEI plant. They were planning to build a new pork-processing plant.

Construction is planned to start in early 2008 for completion towards the end of the year, the report states.

The location for this facility will either be in the Canadian Maritime provinces or in Quebec.

This implies the proposed new plant would not have been built on PEI, McGeoghegan said.

Theres a lot of big questions about what they had planned, raising all this money and their intentions were not even for PEI.

Committee member and MLA Janice Sherry was highly critical of the Quebec owners exploring alternative plans while the previous government continually propped up PEIs plant with taxpayers money.

They walked off with how many hundreds of thousands of dollars of taxpayers money, Sherry said, referring to almost $1 million paid out to the Quebec owners in salaries, bonuses, consulting fees and travel expenses.

These business owners from Quebec were obviously having a great time taking money out of the (PEI) company with really no consideration of the hog industry on Prince Edward Island.

Public accounts has finished looking at the auditor generals report on the plant but plans to continue investigating NOFG. The committee has called former agriculture minister Jim Bagnall, former provincial treasurer Mitch Murphy, who was in charge of the PEI Lending Agency, as well as former development minister Mike Currie, to testify about key decisions in the province forwarding millions in unsecured loans to the company. The Guardian