Consider all this to be informed speculation.
I'd love to deliver more -- just the facts, ma'am, bare and alone -- but I can't. There are two reasons:
Reason No. 1: A stone wall at Queen's Park. To be fair, there are cracks appearing, but open provision of basic information is so slow as to appear unforthcoming.
To whom has the Ontario Realty Corp. sold public property over the past two years? At which locations? For how much money? After three days of asking all the right people point-blank, I can't tell you.
Has the ORC entered into an agreement of purchase and sale with P. Gabriele & Sons of Woodbridge, or Landcrest Development Management of Richmond Hill, on any property other than those 14 hectares at the corner of Bloomington Road and Yonge Street in Aurora?
What is the deal between the Gabriele companies and Her Majesty the Queen in Right of Ontario on that property? How come the lawyer representing both parties before the Ontario Municipal Board doesn't even know the answer to that basic question? How come we don't know?
Remember, this is our property (and that much is a simple fact).
Reason No. 2: People have livelihoods; they have families. Nobody in the real-estate business in Greater Toronto can afford to volunteer answers to these questions. The ORC, with a billion-dollar portfolio of public property on the block, is the elephant in their garden -- and this elephant has political power to go along with its long memory, making it doubly dangerous.
So let's speculate about one part of this story: What's going on in Aurora.
The transaction is currently being investigated by auditors with Management Board, as well as outside auditors with Grant Thornton. (They are also investigating P. Gabriele & Son's highly lucrative flip of some publicly owned industrial land in Mississauga, among other deals.)
Not knowing what they know about Aurora, here's the most generous possible speculation: Our well intentioned but unwitting civil servants are being bested by a clever businessman.
What the rest of us do know is that the ORC still owns the 14 hectares that surrounds Cardinal Carter high school and the headquarters building of the York Region separate school board -- a choice slice of would-be subdivision. But it is Landcrest, a Gabriele-owned firm, that has gone to the Ontario Municipal Board to argue for the official plan amendment and rezoning that is necessary before that lovely farmland can sprout its final cash crop of expensive estate housing.
Sorry, I can't tell you who's paying for that work -- you or Landcrest. Neither can the lawyer, Alan Macos, who is representing Landcrest/ORC at the OMB. He says he sends his bills to Landcrest, but doesn't know what arrangement Landcrest has made with the property owner.
(Mr. Macos is one of about eight lawyers who works at the small but influential Toronto firm of Morrison Brown Sosnovitch, a group that includes Progressive Conservative fundraiser and lobbyist Jeffery Lyons. Another one of the lawyers there, Kamleh Nicola, is handling Mr. Lyons's defence of a lawsuit involving the ORC's sale of The Keg Mansion restaurant on Jarvis Street.)
So anyway, why didn't Mr. Frank Gabriele just buy the land himself, pay the list price and take his own chances at the OMB? Why is the ORC fronting for him at the OMB?
(Mr. Gabriele has not returned phone calls to The Globe and Mail, so we don't know his version of events either.)
Let's speculate that Mr. Gabriele made an offer to purchase the land, with a closing conditional on his being able to sever and rezone it, and that for whatever reason the ORC agreed. He puts down a deposit representing a fraction of the land's value, but nobody else can get their hands on it for a year or more -- however long it takes to fulfill the conditions.
If that is true, our unwitting civil servants have unwittingly extended him what amounts to an indefinite, interest-free loan against a multimillion-dollar property. The developer ties up the land for as long as required to improve its value -- but he doesn't have to borrow the money to pay for it, or to pay interest on the money he would have had to borrow to pay for it.
Nice deal.
And if Landcrest ultimately doesn't succeed in rezoning the property -- what then? Does Mr. Gabriele close the deal and pay the full price?
That last bit of speculation is unfair. The jury will disregard it. But it seems dead certain that the ORC and Gabriele & Sons have entered a conditional agreement of purchase and sale on the Aurora property. With a very long, indefinite closing.
And the most generous thing you can say about that, from a taxpayer's point of view -- not knowing all the facts, mind you -- is that it is a very stupid deal indeed.