He owed hundreds of dollars in parking tickets, and he was spotted circling a square in the city of Toronto – the report suggests he stole it from it.
He was caught in public removing rubbish from an illegal dumping site.
He stood guilty of over 250 charges of failure to keep watch on an abandoned property.
And he was discovered to be a local plumber.
He was not an elected official or a politician – but Tom Sanchez may have been Toronto’s only private garbage contractor for more than 20 years.
Mr Sanchez was an ex-analyst at the Department of Citizenship and Immigration and had become an entrepreneur working as a developer, or “niche player” as he called himself.
A private trash hauler named “Tom Sanchez was not exactly a slouch in the private sector. Toronto law required him to file a financial disclosure report, which he did regularly. But his yearly reports may tell us more about his life than his money.
According to the report, at least one of his financial disclosures listed “Tom Sanchez Consulting” as a company he owned. The report stated he had $190,000 in cash in his name.
“It’s both criminal and unethical for Mr. Sanchez to have written this man off from his asset disclosures in the fall of 2009,” says Jennifer Carper, Ontario’s representative in the national assembly.
The private trash hauler was no stranger to municipal politics either. In 2016 Mr Sanchez faced allegations that he had made contributions to some of the councillors from his business and campaign funds.
As it turned out, Mr Sanchez’s company and its operatives had also been charged with campaign financing violations, along with the chamber of commerce of his city.
Those charges didn’t work out in his favour because the “delicate settlement agreement” was made to the rules back in 2013. By 2017 Mr Sanchez’s trash collection company was no longer in the service.
The thing is, it is in Toronto’s letter of authority to keep track of company deposits and deposits. But it would be a mistake to jump to too many conclusions.
Toronto’s city lawyer claims in her report that the transaction process was not designed to be retroactive. That means that no other details of Mr Sanchez’s legal fees or history with the city were recorded until now.
READ: How a London tax collector allowed private contractors to steal in Quebec