Wildrose calls for health minister firing

Danielle Smith

Aug 9, 2012 at 7:51 am in News by tyler.king

The opposition Wildrose Party is calling for Premier Redford to fire health minister Fred Horne over the Allaudin Merali expense scandal.

Leader Danielle Smith says the minister’s claims that the government didn’t know Merali’s history when he was hired to be AHS’s CFO doesn’t add up.

“He received a $220 lunch with the guy,” Smith said. “So, for him to try to argue initially that he didn’t know about this guy’s history, I mean he’s just not being truthful with the public. [Deputy Premier Doug] Horner contradicted him the same day, saying that they actually did know the history.”

Smith says Redford needs to dig deeper.

“We believe that it’s not enough to just look at a single executive in the health superboard,” she said. “We believe that because so many of the executives had previously had positions on previous health regions, we need to go back and examine all of the records going back to 2005.”

“Because if there are others in the health board today who have a similar approach to submitting expenses, we need to know that now,” she added. “So I think a new minister would be able to set [sic] the reset button.”

Allaudin Merali racked up more than 300 thousand dollars in expenses when he worked for Capital Health; he was recently fired as AHS’s chief financial officer.

Published August 9, 2012

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