Quadriga Art Bastards

June 13th, 2012
07:30 PM ET



.. with Gorgeous Drew Griffin and David Fitzpatrick reports.

Tonight on AC360: Another charity linked to direct mail company
If you look at the dogs and cats being so well cared for by the Montreal SPCA, you’d think it’s a charity in solid shape.

But the executive director of the charity told CNN that the organization is still in significant debt to a U.S. direct mail fund raising company after signing a seven year contract.

Nicholas Gilman, the Montreal SPCA’s Executive Director, told CNN’s Drew Griffin that his charity once owed a little more than $4 million to a company called Quadriga Art, headquartered in New York City. Quadriga Art is the same direct mail company still owed more than $15 million by a Washington-based veterans charity, now under investigation by the Senate Finance Committee. That $4 million debt has now been whittled down to around $1.7 million but Quadriga Art, Gilman said, also has a lien on the charity’s shelter in Montreal.

Gilman says the charity’s previous president was fired and “it was not a smart decision on the SPCA’s part and we let Quadriga create strategy for us.”

Tonight’s report is the first in a two part investigative series. Tomorrow night, Keeping Them Honest, we’ll have a story about how the fired president of that Canadian charity became the president of a new U.S. animal charity whose signature program called “Baghdad Pups” isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.