Saturday, July 18, 2009

The Tangled Accounting Mess of the Goodyears and the Adoption Agency

This adoption agency story just keeps getting deeper, and I'm sure as accountants sort through the tangle, they'll find many questionable transactions.

A great number of questions still remain about how deep the Goodyears were with this supposed non-profit Christian group.

We know that his company Constant Energy Inc. is named as one of the creditors, and we know that Valerie Goodyear was one of the original employees of the agency, and was still employed by them at the time of the bankruptcy.

In his disclosure to the ethics Commissioner we find the following information:

Assets:• Co-owner with my spouse of Constant Energy Inc., a private real estate holding company.

Liabilities:• Mortgage, jointly with spouse, with the Royal Bank of Canada;• Guarantor, jointly with spouse, on a mortgage with Merix Financial – Paradigm Quest Inc.;• Guarantor, jointly with spouse, on a line of credit with Royal Bank of Canada.

Spouse’s source of income in the last 12 months:• Employment income from Imagine Adoptions

Spouse’s/ activities:• President, officer and member of the board of directors of Constant Energy Inc.
Signature Date: 2009/02/25

Name: Gary Goodyear

You can see that he lists his wife's income source as Imagine Adoption and apparently she had worked with them for several years.

Another aside from this terrible story is that nine of the children scheduled to be adopted to families in Canada, were actually taken from their own families illegally, so had to be returned.

MP's firm linked to adoption group
Bankrupt agency rented office space from company owned by Goodyear and wife
Toronto Star
Jul 18, 2009
Brian Caldwell
WATERLOO REGION RECORD

CAMBRIDGE, Ont. – A company owned by federal cabinet minister Gary Goodyear and his wife rented office space to an adoption agency that collapsed this week amid concerns about suspect expenses. Valerie Goodyear, co-owner with her husband of Constant Energy Inc., also worked for the agency – Kids Link International Adoption Agency – for several years before it went bankrupt.

The failure of the Cambridge-based organization, which operated under the name Imagine Adoption, shocked up to 450 Canadian families trying to adopt children from overseas. Their hopes and investments – $20,000 or more in some cases – are in jeopardy as ankruptcy trustees and government officials scramble to sort out the situation ....

2 comments:

  1. Is an "ethics report" available for 2006 or 2007?
    Ms Goodyear has written that they first met Hayhow in summer of 2006 & that she went to work at Imagine in Oct. 2006.

    Present tenant in Goodyear's office under lease to Imagine is a chiropractor (Goodyear's former profession.)

    In the filings I noted the huge lease liabilities, but no income from the sub leases.

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  2. It's often difficult to trace some of these non-profit organizations, because there will be several linked in a maze with no exit. What I believe is that Imagine may have claimed the rent from the sub-let because they would have more tax advantages than the Goodyear's private company.

    It's a mess and I don't know how they are going to talk their way out of this one. I'd also like to know what happened to the more than four million dollars raised to build a village in Ethiopia. Have they started it yet?

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