UNFORGETTABLE SAGAS, SCOOPS AND SCANDALS
 from Toronto Life’slong-form archives

Dear Reader,

This week, former bureaucrat Sanjay Madan was sentenced to 10 years in prison after pleading guilty to embezzling more than $47 million from the Ontario government. From 2011 to 2020, Madan used his senior role within the Ministry of Education’s IT department to operate a lucrative kickback scheme, pocketing about $36 million. He then stole another $11 million in Covid relief funds. How did he get away with the deception for so long? In “Easy Money,” Ethan Lou takes readers inside the culture of chaos—and endemic fraud—at Queen’s Park, revealing how an unassuming and well-liked Madan duped everyone around him.

Easy Money

Sanjay Madan’s job was to distribute pandemic payments to Ontario families. He found an ingenious way to take millions for himself

BY ETHAN LOU | MAY 25, 2021

By all appearances, Sanjay Madan was the quintessential Queen’s Park bureaucrat: quiet, modest and benign. He did his work, collected his paycheque and avoided the spotlight. But there was more to Madan than the hardworking family man everyone knew and liked. In 2020, when he was tasked with doling out provincial pandemic-relief payments, he sensed an opportunity and seized it, redirecting $11 million of taxpayer money into the bank accounts of his family members, his business partner and their companies. Perhaps most shocking, writes Ethan Lou, is that this wasn’t the first time he’d siphoned government money—it was simply the first time he’d been caught.

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