Church administrator embezzled $400K, Winnipeg police say

Winnipeg police have accused a 39-year-old church administrator of embezzling more than $400,000 from a Windsor Park church.

According to police, the Archdiocese of Saint Boniface uncovered inconsistencies during a routine audit in May 2015.

They went to Winnipeg police, and then, the Archdiocese conducted a thorough audit over the next several months.

The man allegedly withdrew and embezzled hundreds of thousands of dollars from the Parish of Saint Bernadette on Cottonwood Road and then entered false information into a general ledger.

Police said the man was entrusted with managing the finances of the church over a six-year period from March 2009 to December 2015.

Richard Frechette, head financial administrator for the Archdiocese of St. Boniface, said after the routine audits yielded a few red flags, "We very quickly moved in the following week and confiscated all the financial data and brought it to the diocese for safekeeping."

He said they then started investigating, did a forensic audit and finally handed over the results to the police.

"Our reaction was shock," he said. "[We felt] tremendous sadness for the parish. We were upset."

Frechette said the man wasn't fired. He resigned before they did a routine audit, which happens every three years.

"He knew the audit was coming in 2015. He resigned at the end of 2014," said Frechette.

In November, the church presented its findings to the Winnipeg police commercial crime unit.

Leo McCaughan was charged Tuesday with theft, fraud and falsification of documents. He was remanded into custody.

Insurance only covers $25K

Frechette said their insurance only covers $25,000 of what was lost.

"The rest is yet to be seen," he said. "It depends on what courts do with this. The courts can go for restitution. If it is awarded, we will have the right to go after his personal assets."

The parish ran a deficit in 2014, he added.

"Part of the cash that was stolen was taken from the collection plate on Sunday from parishioners, which never made it to the bank," Frechette said.

Doug Cross, the deacon at St Bernadette, said the parish has been waiting for charges to be laid for "quite some time."

"It is before the courts, and we don't have a conviction, but what it feels like is betrayal and it hurts," he said.

Cross said the church thought donations were down due to a recession in 2008.

"We figured donations just never came back up. That's how we explained it because we didn't know what was going on," he said.

'Excuses were made'

"I think excuses were made, you know?  'My dad gave me an early inheritance, or I won the lottery,'" said Phil Daley, the pastor at Saint Bernadette. "Bottom line is, people just said, 'Oh, OK.'"

Staff at the church had to keep the investigation a secret until it was complete.

"They suffered enormously trying to keep it to themselves," he said. "If you know what a parish community is like, it's like a large family."

Frechette said the Archdiocese has never found a "discrepancy of this magnitude."

The parish now has a new business manager.