Manitoba cabinet minister cleared of insider trading allegation after ethics review
Mike Moroz didn't break conflict legislation, commissioner says after PC complaint triggered investigation
Manitoba's ethics commissioner has ruled Mike Moroz, the minister of innovation and new technology, did not break the province's conflict of interest law.
The Opposition Progressive Conservatives had accused Moroz of being in a conflict by answering questions about a 911 service outage while owning shares in Telus.
The Tories also accused Moroz of using inside information that criticized the phone company for the outage and selling company stock.
In a nine-page report, ethics commissioner Jeffrey Schnoor says there is no evidence that Moroz made any government decisions involving Telus and there is no ban on cabinet ministers owning shares in publicly traded companies.
Schnoor also says Moroz did not have insider information and only had access to documents that were publicly available at the time.
The 911 disruption in March occurred at a time when a 55-year-old man from Fisher Branch died of a heart attack, and family and friends said they had been unable to get through to the emergency line.
"There is no evidence that Minister Moroz made any decision in this matter. At most, he wrote to Telus to express concern and ask for information; this cannot be characterized as a decision," Schnoor wrote in his decision released Wednesday.
Phone services are regulated federally by the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission, not provincially, Schnoor said, and Moroz did not have inside information.
"On the contrary, his information about this matter appears to have come from media reports and publicly available documents on the CRTC's website," Schnoor wrote.
Moroz sold his 500 shares in Telus in May and garnered $10,391, incurring a loss of $1,591, the report says.