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Coun. Giorgio Mammoliti has pleaded guilty to four charges under the Municipal Elections Act and has agreed to pay a penalty of $17,500 for exceeding the spending limit during the 2010 election campaign and filing false paperwork.
Mammoliti entered the pleas on Friday morning, bringing an end to a saga that began nearly two years ago when an audit committee found he exceeded the $30,000 campaign spending limit by $12,000, failed to report campaign expenses incurred on his personal credit card and improperly reported several others.
As part of his guilty plea, Mammoliti admitted to exceeding the spending limit by $10,000 and omitting some campaign expenses from his final paperwork.
“In an effort to resolve the matter and to continue representing the community I did plead guilty with the understanding that it was inadvertent,” Mammoliti told reporters at city hall. “I will get back to work now and move on. It closes a chapter.”
Mammoliti could have faced removal from office and a ban on running in future elections but ended up receiving a much lighter penalty by pleading guilty.
Speaking with reporters, the long-time Ward 7 councillor stressed that the judge in the case found that he “acted in good faith every step of the way” and did not intentionally violate the election rules.
As for how he ended up surpassing the spending limit by such a large amount of money, Mammoliti blamed an abandoned mayoral campaign for the error.
“It speaks to combining two elections where we had to fold up the election for mayor and then very quickly move into a councillor campaign that we had about a month to set up,” he said. “It speaks to how complex it is.”
Mammoliti’s guilty pleas come one day after council voted to cap the amount of his legal fees that they will reimburse in his battle against an unrelated code of conduct ruling at $20,000.
To date, Mammoliti has racked up a bill of $48,476 fighting city council’s decision to dock him three months’ pay for improperly accepting $80,000 from a fundraising dinner held in his honour.
