TORONTO

Councillor Giorgio Mammoliti is taking the City of Toronto to court.

Mammoliti has served the city with a legal notice for judicial review of July’s council decision to strip him of three months pay — around $26,000 — after the integrity commissioner found that he breached the code of conduct by pocketing $80,000 from a 2013 fundraising dinner.

At the time, Mammoliti maintained he did nothing wrong and promised to take the city to court — he was already challenging Integrity Commissioner Janet Leiper’s decision to launch an investigation through the courts.

Both Mammoliti and city officials confirmed Friday that he has now made good on that threat and served the city with notice.

The York West (Ward 7) councillor wasn’t at the final council meeting of the term — the first meeting since he was sanctioned by his colleagues.

Mammoliti also was absent from last week’s executive committee meeting and this month’s parks committee meeting that he chairs. He did attend a portion of this month’s Etobicoke-York community council meeting.

Councillors voted 26-7 late Thursday night to excuse Mammoliti’s absence from the four-day council meeting — the vote to excuse a fellow councillor’s absence is traditionally unanimous.

Reached by phone on Friday, Mammoliti — who is running for re-election — said his failure to appear at the council meeting had nothing to do with council’s vote a month earlier.

“I’ve been sick,” Mammoliti told the Toronto Sun. “I’m not going to get into it.

“I think people know me well enough to know that if I’m absent from politics it had nothing to do with what happened. Politics is my life whether I get paid or whether I don’t get paid.

“At the end of the day, I’m going to get paid.”

The courts should be the one to determine whether or not he did anything wrong, not his fellow politicians, Mammoliti said.

Asked about the council vote on his absence, Mammoliti described it as “politics at its best.”

“I don’t think I’ve ever voted against anybody being absent,” he said. “I think that there are clearly individuals in that council that have an axe to grind and quite frankly I think most people are reading through what’s going on.”