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The Montreal police department has been paying thousands of dollars in expenses for “special investigations” from a fund it calls “petty cash” over the past two years, and the biggest and most frequent dips into the till have occurred this year.

The Montreal Gazette discovered the fund, labelled “Petite Caisse Enquête VDM” (“City of Montreal investigation petty cash”), while examining the city’s municipal expenses going back to 2012. However, the first of the 105 expenditures that turn up in municipal records with that label were authorized in January 2015.

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Different senior police department personnel authorized the expenditures, which start at $2,000 and which total about $550,000.

In fact, they’re among $1 million in police expenses that have been justified as “petty cash” in the past two years. That’s because the Montreal police have also authorized payments using a second “petty cash” label since the fall of 2014, called “Petite Caisse SPVM” (“Petty cash Montreal police department”).