The North West Co. has fired one of its store managers, Mike Taylor, after over $80,000 disappeared from an elderly couple’s account at Eastmain’s Northern Store.
The Elders, Willie and Hattie Moses, discovered there wasn’t any money left in their account when they went to make a deposit with their stepdaughter.
They made a complaint on April 8 and the North West Co. quickly opened an investigation. Taylor, who had just been transferred to the Northern Store in Inukjuak, was fired shortly afterwards.
Eastmain police and the Sûreté du Québec are investigating and say they plan to lay fraud charges against Taylor when the probe is complete sometime before fall.
Taylor and his family moved back to his wife’s home in the Native community of Shamatawa, Manitoba.
Reached there, Taylor denied that he is the same Mike Taylor who worked in Eastmain. “No, I’m not,” he said, before abruptly hanging up.
But when The Nation called back, his wife admitted it was in fact the same Mike Taylor. She vehemently denied her husband had stolen any money.
“Yes, they told us there was an investigation going on, but the police, I didn’t know they were involved. We had no idea they were doing this,” she said.
“There was no money taken. If we had the money, would we be here? We’re s**t for cash right now,” she said, refusing to give her name.
“The money just disappeared. But where it went we
don’t know. It was a big surprise for us.”
She said two or three other people had access to the office where the accounts are. She defended her husband, saying he “is always precise with his numbers.
“There’s always two sides to the story in a situation like this. You’re going to have to know the whole story when it comes to the North West Company. I can’t really say much about it.”
She, in turn, accused Northern of improperly removing over $3,700 from the Taylor family’s own account at the Inukjuak Northern Store to pay for bills after Mike Taylor was fired.
Eastmain police admit they still haven’t interviewed Taylor, but claim he confessed to Northern’s investigators that he did in fact empty out the Elders’ account. “He confessed to the crime so they fired him,” said a police constable.
When we called Taylor back to ask whether he had confessed, a woman who answered hung up as soon as we identified ourselves as The Nation.
Jim Deyell, the company’s regional director for James Bay, apologized for the incident. “It’s a most unfortunate thing. There’s an element of trust there. Has to be,” he said.
Northern has returned the lost money to the Moses couple. Willie and Hattie are theparents of former Cree Grand Chief Ted Moses, currently the Cree Ambassador to theUnited Nations. Taylor had worked for Northern for “at least four or five years,”two of them in Eastmain, Deyell said.
