What's up guys and welcome back to wall street millennial on this channel, we cover everything related to stocks and investing in the past, we've made a lot of videos covering corporate frauds and scandals, but corporate executives aren't the only powerful people prone to corruption. Today, we're looking at the we cherry controversy, which is perhaps the largest scam involving a charity in canadian history. The canadian government was deeply involved at the highest levels with prime minister justin, trudeau being implicated and his finance minister bill morneau forced to resign in disgrace. Credit for this video topic goes to one of our canadian subscribers who mentioned this topic in the comments section of a previous video.

First, we have to understand the history of we charity in 1995, a 12 year old canadian, by the name of craig kielburger traveled to bangladesh, with a family friend to see the conditions of child labourers. At the same time, canadian prime minister, jean trition, was traveling to india for a state visit. After this incident, craig became very famous among the canadian media, along with his brother mark kielburger. They founded free the children.

A charity focused on advocating against child labor. They later changed the name to we charity and expanded to focus on education, water, healthcare, food and economic opportunity in developing nations. They created we schools, which help schools create a social learning environment. We villages which provide economic opportunity for impoverished communities in developing countries, as well as other initiatives throughout the late 2000s and 2010s.

The wii charity stature on the international stage grew dramatically. They hosted annual wee days in giant stadiums with tens of thousands of students in attendance. They expanded outside of canada, holding these events in london, chicago seattle and other cities. People viewed we as an uncontroversial charity that was doing the right thing.

They were able to score endorsements from high-profile celebrities, including charlize, theron, selena gomez and demi lovato, of course, running a charity costs money. They got high-profile corporate sponsors, including virgin atlantic airways, royal bank of canada, walgreens unilever and others. In 2008, the kielberger brothers created meet wii, which was a for-profit company selling, sustainably sourced products, leadership, training and travel experience. The branding of need to.

We is very similar to that of. We charity. In fact, the wii charity and me to wii movement are often referred to jointly as the wii movement. This alone is already somewhat of a red flag.

The wii charity brand was built over many years and with millions of dollars worth of donations and volunteer hours by creating the for-profit meet wii company, the kielberger brothers are in a way profiting off of the wii brand. However, most people viewed it as fine, because mitsuwi would contribute half of its profits to we charity. They said the other half would go to reinvesting in the business. The related party transactions between the non-profit, we charity and the for-profit meet-wii company have raised some eyebrows.

In recent years, the canadian publication candeland recently conducted an interview with kate behan, the managing director of charity watchdog group charity intelligence. She says that the way we charity pays millions of dollars to meet wii raises massive red flags based on the wii charities audited financial reports. They paid me to wii over 4 million dollars in 2019 for the purchase of promotional goods, travel and leadership, training, goods, rents and books. In a response to this, we charity points out that they also received half the profits from me to we and over the past five years we charity has received 1.3 million dollars more from me to wii than they have paid.

So, overall, the charity is getting a net benefit from their related party transactions with me to we need to. We is a privately held business, so they don't publish any public financial reports. Thus we do not know the exact nature of their contributions to we charity. According to charity, intelligence's managing director kate, behind the contributions are possibly a mixture of money, time and other benefits which they assign some monetary value to, and while it's not unheard of for charities to have transactions with related party companies, the wii charity transactions are on a Much larger scale than anything she's seen in the past, the value of the time and other benefits could be open to a significant amount of interpretation.

It's possible there's a net cash outflow from we charity to me to we, the level of disclosures we charity provides is not enough to verify whether or not this is the case. Furthermore, the reported payments of we charity to me to we failed to consider the benefit me to we receives by using the wii brand. This alone could be worth millions of dollars as meets. We would likely not be able to exist in any significant capacity if not for its ability to use the wii brand.

Another area of controversy is the close relationship between the wii movement and canadian prime minister justin, trudeau, justin. Trudeau has been a long time, supporter of the wii organization and his mother and brother were paid over three hundred thousand dollars collectively to speak at wii events. This is a lot of money for speeches. Justin trudeau's wife also worked for the wii organization in a capacity as an unpaid volunteer, but she received reimbursements for expenses incurred during these activities.

The wii organization also had a very close relationship with justin trudeau's finance minister bill morneau bill morneau received 41 thousand dollars worth of travel expenditures for himself and his family in 2017 from wii charity. In addition, one of his daughters was a paid employee of we charity and another of his daughters spoke at multiple. We events, internal exchanges within the canadian finance ministry, described the moreno family as having a close personal relationship with the kielburger family who ran the wheat organizations. The kielberger brothers had successfully turned the we charity into an extremely well-connected organization, with access to the prime minister and finance minister.

It appears that these relationships would become very important later on now that we've covered the questionable financials of the we charity and their connections with justin trudeau. We can get into the scandal in april of 2020, the pandemic was raging across canada, forcing businesses to shut down and bring economic hardship to families across the country. Justin, trudeau tasked the finance department to devise a plan to financially assist the country's student population led by finance minister bill morneau. They developed the canada student service grant or cssg under the program.

Young canadians could receive 1 000 for performing 100 hours of volunteer work or five thousand dollars for performing 500 hours of work. The idea was to give students something productive to do over the summer as employment opportunities had diminished as a result of the pandemic. Through a non-competitive process, the government awarded we charity the contract to administer the cssg program. They would pay.

We charity up to 43 million dollars to administer almost one billion dollars worth of grants to students. The government claimed that we charity was the only organization within canada that had the capabilities to administer the program, and thus there was no need to seek bids from other charities. This assertion immediately raised suspicions. Roughly one-fifth of the canadian population speaks french as their primary language.

We charity is an english-speaking organization and did not have the capacity to administer the program in french-speaking regions. They would have to subcontract these areas out to a different organization. Furthermore, the psac, which represents canada's public sector employees, says the government had sufficient infrastructure to administer the program directly. There is no need to pay a non-governmental charity to do it.

We charities suffered tremendous financial hardship as a result of the pandemic, as it inhibited their ability to hold live events and their corporate sponsors cut back on donations to conserve cash. The charity was forced to lay off a significant portion of its paid staff in the early days of the pandemic, many viewed the 43 million cssg contract award as a way to bail out the wii organizations. The apparent conflict of interest caused a huge controversy in canada. Justin, trudeau is the leader of the liberal party.

The opposing conservative party made a big deal out of the issue and used it to paint the liberal government as corrupt and things weren't. Looking good for trudeau. He initially said we charity had never paid his family members. Any money it was later exposed that they paid his mother and brother hundreds of thousands of dollars.

The prime minister's office also claimed that they had no involvement in the selection of we charity for the grant. This also turned out to be false, as intergovernmental emails showed significant involvement by the prime minister's office. The ethics committee, as well as the finance and government operations committees of the canadian parliament, launched official investigations of the scandal. One of the biggest bombshells revealed in the investigations was 41 000 of travel expenses.

The we organization paid on behalf of the finance minister bill morneau. He said he forgot about the expenses and agreed to repay them. In august of 2020 justin trudeau used his power as prime minister to temporarily disband the committees investigating the scandal. This was viewed by the opposition party as an attempt to buy time for a cover-up.

Eventually, the ethics commissioner released a report regarding trudeau's involvement in the affair. It said that while there was an appearance of a conflict of interest, they could not find evidence that he gave we charity preferential treatment. Unfortunately, the same could not be said for bill morneau. The ethics investigation found that mourinho had violated three conflict of interest laws.

He gave we charity preferential treatment by permitting his ministerial staff to disproportionately assist them. When they sought governmental funding in august of 2020, he was forced to resign in disgrace. The wii charity was forced to return the grants that they received for the program. At this point, they were running out of money and shut down all of their canadian operations, leading to the layoff of 115 employees.

The biggest losers of this scandal were the canadian students. As a result of the scandal, the canadian student service grant program was aborted, had the program been run directly by the canadian government. Instead, millions of canadian youth possibly could have at least made some money during the coveted summer of 2020.. At best, the wii charity fiasco was an example of extreme incompetence and poor judgment on the part of the trudeau administration.

At worst, it may have been a sophisticated scheme by the kielberger brothers to bribe members of the trudeau family to benefit the wii charity. This could have benefited them personally, as they possibly extract millions of dollars into their for-profit me to we company through the questionable related party transactions. Of course, these are just our opinions and speculations based on publicly available information. Neither the kielberger brothers nor justin trudeau have been criminally charged in relation to the scandal.

Alright guys that wraps it up for this video. What do you think about the wii charity fiasco? Do you believe the assessment that justin trudeau did not commit any ethics violations? Let us know in the comments section below as always. Thank you so much for watching and we'll see you in the next one wall, street millennial, signing out.