From the Williams Lake Tribune:
Williams Lake Mayor Surinderpal Rathor has paid a $2,700 penalty to the Chief Electoral Officer of BC (Elections BC) for a contribution error during his mayoral election campaign in 2022.
During the campaign he accepted seven contributions totally $5,400 that came from organizations but were recorded as coming from individuals when filed on Jan. 11, 2023 with his campaign expenditures report.
Elections BC did a review and informed Rathor and his financial agent, Brad Huston, of the error.
Following that, Rathor and Huston submitted an amended disclosure statement on Sept. 24, 2023, identifying the contributions as prohibited and informing Elections BC they had returned the money to the seven parties that had made the contributions.
The amended statement was then reviewed by Elections BC's investigation team.
“You were cooperative with the investigator, and you indicated that you now have a better knowledge of the rules going forward,” noted a letter addressed Hustaon and dated April 1, 2025.
Speaking from the Council of Forest Industries conference in Prince George Thursday (April 3rd, 2025), Rathor said they complied with all the requests promptly.
“We owned the mistake and we learned from the mistake,” Rathor told the Tribune. “It was an honest mistake by all of us, including me. We were at fault, and admitted the fault.”
Huston told the Tribune they were not hiding anything when they originally submitted the campaign contributions.
"If we did know we are really bad at fraud because when we filled out the forms every donation was listed and we included the company name and they said, 'oh you can't do that.'"
In the letter about the penalty, Elections BC stated it could have been as high as $10,800.
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