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Feenie accused the couple of forcing him out, telling the National Post he had the “wool pulled over my eyes” and that he had “turned to the wrong people for help.”

“It was the biggest mistake of my life,” he said at the time. Sidoo told reporters they had tried to work things out and Feenie quit.

Prior to this year though, the bulk of the headlines about Sidoo were mostly flattering and usually related to his family’s philanthropy.

Photo by Wayne Leidenfrost/Postmedia/File

They have given generously. A new scoreboard for his high school’s stadium. Breakfast programs to feed inner-city children. UBC scholarships. A fundraising venture to reinvigorate UBC’s football program.

“No one has given back to the community more than Dave has,” Espig said.

Sidoo has been showered with accolades in return. He was inducted into the B.C. Football Hall of Fame and B.C. Sports Hall of Fame, honoured with a Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Medal, and awarded the Order of B.C.

In a 2017 interview with the Indo-Canadian Voice, Sidoo said the opportunities for Indo-Canadian youth were infinite, invoking, as he has often done, a pull-yourself-up-by-the-bootstraps work ethic.

“A country like Canada is a place that our immigrant parents came to (in order) to help us get an education and whether you are a mathematician, a violinist, a great pianist or an athlete, if you put your mind to it in Canada, you can do anything you want. And I think that’s what I did.”

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Behind the scenes, however, U.S. prosecutors were developing a very different portrait of Sidoo that suggested he didn’t apply that work ethic to his children.

An indictment filed by prosecutors in U.S. District Court in Boston alleges Sidoo arranged in the fall of 2011 to have someone take an SAT college entrance exam for his older son, Dylan, for $100,000.

The test taker posing as his son received instructions not to get too high a score because Dylan had previously taken the exam himself and got 1460 out of 2400, the indictment says.

The following year, Sidoo is alleged to have made a similar arrangement for his younger son, Jordan. In this instance, the test taker was instructed to get a high score, as Jordan had not previously taken the exam.

Court documents say in the fall of 2013, William Singer, the man accused of masterminding the admissions scheme, drafted a falsified college application essay that purported Jordan had done an internship with an organization that aims to combat gang violence in L.A.