Former AHS CEO alleges wrongful dismissal in $1.7M lawsuit against province

February 12, 2025 Canuck

The former CEO of Alberta Health Services has filed a $1.7-million wrongful dismissal lawsuit against AHS and the province, claiming she was fired because she’d launched an investigation and forensic audit into various contracts and was reassessing deals she had concluded were overpriced with private surgical companies she said had links to government officials.

Athana Mentzelopoulos alleges in the claim, filed in court Wednesday, that Health Minister Adriana LaGrange met with the board on Jan. 7 and demanded the directors fire the CEO.

The board refused, and Mentzelopoulos claims she was fired over Zoom the next day, by Andre Tremblay, the senior provincial health bureaucrat who would replace her as interim CEO.

The lawsuit also states that Tremblay ordered AHS staff to cancel a meeting with the auditor general about the forensic audit and internal review that Mentzelopoulos had told the provincial watchdog about.

Mentzelopoulos’s statement of claim tells of repeated calls, “interference and pressure” from various government officials, including Marshall Smith, then chief of staff to Premier Danielle Smith, to sign deals and extensions with private surgical facilities bidding to do publicly funded procedures, even though they “significantly increased costs” when compared to other private contractors and internal AHS costing estimates.

It also highlights concerns about links between a senior official in AHS’s procurement department and major contractors the health agency deals with. Among those, the official had an email address in November 2022 with the company that would sign a $70-million contract for children’s pain medication with AHS the following month.

Got a tip? Email Julia Wong in confidence at [email protected] or Jason Markusoff at [email protected]

Much of the lawsuit repeats allegations contained in a letter sent from Mentzelopoulos’s lawyer to AHS after her termination in January, which was first reported by the Globe and Mail and later obtained by CBC News. But it also goes into further details on many aspects of the improprieties that the ex-CEO alleges took place within AHS and by the government officials pressuring her to finalize contracts and end her investigations.

A statement of defence has not yet been filed, but CBC News did receive an emailed response to the statement of claim from LaGrange.

“I have seen the filed statement of claim by the former CEO of AHS. It appears to reiterate many of the same allegations that were made in the letter that was obtained by media. Upon initial review, many of the allegations and claims made are clearly false, while others will need to be investigated further as part of the auditor general’s work and the government’s internal review of this matter,” the response said in part.

“As I am a named defendant in this claim, I will be filing a detailed statement of defence in short order. I very much look forward to doing so.”

More to come…

View original article here Source