Downtown Charlottetown, PEI is seen in this November, 2009, file photo.Kevin Van Paassen/The Globe and Mail
The Supreme Court of Prince Edward Island has tossed out a lawsuit that was brought against the province by a U.S.-based technology company connected to the eGaming scandal.
Justice Gordon Campbell found numerous legal problems with the 55-page claim filed by Capital Markets Technologies and asked that the company file a new statement of claim if it wished to proceed.
"It is a long, rambling narrative replete with irrelevant and immaterial facts, evidence, opinion, argument, and speculation," the judge wrote in his decision. "I do not consider the claim as written to be capable of being 'fixed' by a series of amendments and deletions."
Justice Campbell asked CMT to post $1-million in security for future legal costs should it decide to move forward.
CMT director Paul Maines said on Friday he "absolutely" will submit a revised claim.
In April, 2015, CMT filed a $25-million lawsuit against the province of PEI and a handful of individuals, over a failed plan to transform the island into an international online-gambling hub. CMT, through a U.K. company it partly owned, Simplex, worked with PEI on the proposal.
When the gambling deal fell apart in 2012, CMT alleges that the government decided to push ahead with one aspect of the plan, a cutting-edge financial platform, but that it tried to do so with a different company. (The province denies this.) In its lawsuit, CMT has claimed "breach of contract" and "conspiracy."
Jonathan Coady, the Charlottetown lawyer handling the case on behalf of the province, applauded the ruling.
"The judgment really speaks for itself," he said in a statement to The Globe and Mail. "It is a list of very basic and very serious deficiencies in the claims being made against the government. … From the outset, it was clear that this claim had no legal merit."
Last year, a Globe and Mail investigation revealed that several key government insiders had privately invested in CMT and stood to profit personally if the eGaming hub was successful. The Globe also found that the province had planned to circumvent the criminal code – which forbids operating online gambling on a national or international scale – by placing gambling servers on aboriginal land. Officials hoped to follow a precedent set by the Kahnawake reserve outside Montreal, which has run an online-gambling business without consequence for more than a decade by asserting its right to self-govern.