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Strategies & Market Trends : Dino's Bar & Grill -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Goose94 who wrote (109569)	6/26/2021 9:22:13 AM
From: Goose94	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 203330

Can'tTrust (TRST-T) whistleblower reacts to OSC charges against former executives Nick Lalonde still remembers the moment he knew something was amiss at CannTrust Holdings Inc. It was nearly 4 p.m., close to the end of the working day, when he was asked to stay late at CannTrust's Pelham, Ont. facility and hang some plastic wall tarps the company needed to put up for Health Canada. "We're going to take some pictures for Health Canada. Just got to hang up some tarps, move some cameras around and take some pictures, that's all. I thought, 'OK, sure. Let's do it.' I didn't think too much of it at the time," he told BNN Bloomberg in an interview. In the middle of the photoshoot, his manager told him to pick up a single fallen cannabis leaf off the ground that was showing up in some photos. "I didn't think that was a big deal. There were 50,000 marijuana plants in the room," he said. "That was the point right there that I knew something was up. What are we actually doing here?" That project — erecting plastic tarps and moving benches to help conceal hundreds of cannabis plants from federal inspectors — eventually led Lalonde to inform Health Canada that CannTrust may need to be investigated for growing cannabis in an unlicensed area. It triggered a series of events that resulted in Health Canada suspending CannTrust's cannabis sales and production licences, the company filing for creditor protection and which earlier this week saw the Ontario Securities Commission lay over a dozen quasi-criminal charges on three former CannTrust officials for their involvement in the alleged scheme. Lawyers representing each of the accused said they intend to defend themselves in court and deny any wrongdoing. Lalonde, who now works in the construction industry in southern Ontario, said he thinks the people charged — Mark Litwin, Eric Paul, and former CEO Peter Aceto — should "go to jail for a very long time." The allegations have yet to be proven in court. "It was a very big thing that they did," he said. "They didn't steal a chocolate bar, right? They lied to the government and they got caught doing it, so it's a big deal." He also said he wonders why more people that were involved in the alleged plans to grow unlicensed cannabis weren't charged. "There's other people that were involved in it and it seem to be that they're not really getting in trouble, but they just lost their jobs," Lalonde said. In a statement, CannTrust said that it is aware of the charges against the three former executives and that neither the company, its subsidiaries nor any of its current directors, officers or employees have had charges laid against them. The company said it is focused on resolving its civil litigation claims and fully restoring its operations in the Canadian cannabis market. Lalonde said he met with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police on two occasions to describe under oath what he saw and experienced while working at CannTrust from July 2017 to May 2019, when he was in charge of destroying unsaleable cannabis under the self-proclaimed job title “Master of Destruction.” He said he showed officers emails, text messages and videos that corroborated his account of the facts and that he would be happy to testify under oath if he's called to court. "I told [CannTrust employees] that what they were doing was wrong and told them what they should do," he said. "If they come out on their own and explained what was going on instead of a former disgruntled employee, then maybe they would have been a little better off than they are now." Still, Lalonde said he doesn't have too many regrets about blowing the whistle on CannTrust and many of the threats he faced in the past have now faded away. He also said he wouldn't be opposed to ever returning to the cannabis industry. "I lost my dream job," Lalonde said. "I was on salary and was in charge of a lot of people and did what I wanted to do. To have it all taken away, … it sucked. But you had to do the right thing and [whistleblowing] was the right thing to do."