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Monday, March 30, 2015

Ontario taxpayers are carrying the can for Royal Ontario Museum's deadbeat philanthropists


From The Globe and Mail:
...A number of the pledges that the museum promoted, and banked on, during the peak fundraising years for the $300-million renovation have not fully materialized, a Globe and Mail investigation has found. Since then, Ontario taxpayers have assumed the debt the ROM initially owed to CIBC and filled a $23-million void left by these donors – all of whom were given substantial recognition for pledges that, a decade later, remain outstanding....

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

It was a long report from the Globe ... but went pretty easy on ex-ROM CEO William Thorsell, co-incidentally the former Editor-in-Chief of the Globe. This ugly, useless disaster was his idea, and his personal vanity project from start to finish. He decided to play Pharaoh with other people's money, and had the charm, arrogance and patina of class to pull it off. Then he conveniently "retired" when the whole thing went south.

At least the Globe admitted giving the crystal project free advertising, albeit as a "donation" in return for a tax receipt. Perhaps the Globe would also like to provide links to some of the glowing tongue-bath articles they printed in the early 2000s about what a genius museum CEO their former editor had become.

If that's too embarrassing, too much of an admission against interest, they could always link to the profile in FAB:

http://archive.fabmagazine.com/features/Thorsell/index.html

FAB had an interesting take: the Chin Crystal is the drag queen of Bloor Street. I wonder if Thorsell used that phrase to bring the Ajmeras on board for their empty pledge?