“Big Daddy G” was going to take former MP Rahim Jaffer’s company public, riding the green technology wave with high-level financing and, yes, maybe a few government grants thrown in, says Jaffer’s business partner.

Nazim Gillani, whose street name came from his Vancouver days, failed to deliver on a series of promises and Jaffer partner Patrick Glemaud decided to pull the plug.

“Nazim was making promises and they were not realistic,” said Glemaud, an Ottawa lawyer who for the past year has been business partners with Jaffer in a venture they call Green Power Generation.

Glemaud said that with his name being linked to Gillani through media reports and Opposition critic comments, his “name is being dragged through the mud.”

“The only thing I have is my reputation. I haven’t done anything wrong.”

Their Green Power Generation business is a “shambles,” Glemaud said.

Some of Gillani’s promises were made last fall at his home-business address in Etobicoke. Others were made at Club Paradise, a strip club where Glemaud was invited on one occasion as a guest of Gillani. Told by the Star that Gillani sometimes photographed people in the VIP lounge using a cellphone camera, Glemaud said he did not see any photographs taken the evening he was there.

Glemaud is now trying to distance himself from Gillani, a wheeler-dealer facing one set of fraud charges and under investigation by several police forces, including the RCMP, Halton Region Police and York Region Police.

“I don’t understand why people are trying to destroy my life,” Glemaud said yesterday. He said the pressure from government critics and the media is getting to him.

“I was an immigrant, I came to this country and worked hard.”

The Star revealed last week that Gillani runs a business that has allegedly bilked several investors of hundreds of thousands of dollars. In each case, Gillani promised to raise funds in the stock market, but only after the businesses had kicked in cash of its own. Victims of these schemes speculate that it is their money that funds Gillani’s fast car, strip club lifestyle.

Gillani was introduced to Jaffer last year by a mutual friend. Glemaud won’t name the friend. Before Glemaud entered the picture, Jaffer had already attended several Gillani-chaired business meetings at Toronto-area steakhouses, handing out his MP business card (he was no longer an MP) and suggesting to those attending that he could connect them with government funding.

Glemaud, who has known Jaffer since their university days, said he is sure that Jaffer was unaware of Gillani’s checkered financial past at the time.

By this time — September 2009 — Jaffer and Glemaud were trying to grow their fledgling company. Its website boasts it is “Canada’s Premier Green Energy Development Firm.”

Glemaud said he firmly believed at the time that, just as the Internet spawned many new business ventures, there was a great deal of money to be made in the “Green” movement. As a lawyer, he had worked for the federal natural resources department reviewing and approving government grant contracts. That taught him both how to make a grant application and gave him a basis for his green energy company.

“I wanted to be at the forefront.”

Enter Gillani, who, Glemaud said, proposed that his International Strategic Investments company could take Jaffer and Glemaud’s company public. Glemaud liked the idea, and he and Jaffer continued their dialogue with Gillani and green companies that could become part of Green Power Generation.

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“I wanted to build businesses, we were going to own many pieces of projects and then go public.” Glemaud said he hoped to get private financing and, if it was possible, secure government grants as well.

Some things about Gillani concerned him, Glemaud said. His office was unusual, he had an odd assortment of associates and he had a lifestyle that the father of four young children said was different than he was accustomed to.

“He was into drinking, a flamboyant person,” Glemaud said of Gillani. The meetings were at Gillani’s home and business in a house on Kipling Avenue in Etobicoke, with four or five fine cars in the driveway. After one, Glemaud accompanied Gillani and others to the Paradise Club, a strip joint on Bloor Street near Dufferin Ave. Glemaud said Jaffer was not at that meeting or Paradise Club visit.

(The Star has interviewed a former bouncer at the club, who described the scene when Gillani pulled up on any occasion. “The owners would clear the VIP lounge and we would be sent outside to hold the door for Naz and whoever he brought.” The bouncer, who spoke on condition of anonymity — he fears retribution from other people who work at Paradise — said Gillani threw around “up to $10,000 cash” a night. He said Gillani photographed people he brought as guests “when a girl’s head was between his legs.” The Star previously reported that nervous investors caught in compromising positions at the club were afraid to speak to police about Gillani.)

By October, Glemaud said he was getting nervous about the business dealings with Gillani.

He said Jaffer had other meetings with Gillani (“it was more Rahim meeting him than me”) but he decided to cool the association.

He said that in November, when York Region police arrested Gillani on a $1.6 million fraud charge, Gillani told Jaffer.

“I am trying to cut my ties on behalf of GPG. I don’t know about Rahim,” said Glemaud.

Brian Kilgore, a spokesman hired by Gillani, said yesterday that Gillani did meet with Glemaud, but only provided an “introduction” to another company that had an interesting green technology.

Kilgore would not comment on Glemaud’s claim that Gillani promised to take Green Power public. Kilgore also would not comment on the allegation that Gillani photographed business associates in compromising positions.