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Jaswal said organizer Snover Dhillon not only didn’t work on his campaign, but returned $10,000 the candidate paid him for unrelated consulting on his real-estate business.

The whole controversy has been manufactured by the media, he charged.

“I spent the day yesterday over here too,” said Jaswal at a meeting in the office of Conservative party lawyer Arthur Hamilton. “ I am getting calls from all the media. It is distracting me from my goal. It is hurting me and my party.”

The campaign for the June 7 election has been repeatedly sidetracked by the 407 controversy.

As first documented by the National Post, the private toll road says it was the victim of an “internal theft” of information on 60,000 customers, news that came the same day that PC candidate Simmer Sandhu quit as the Tories’ Brampton East candidate. Sandhu worked at 407 until February, but says any allegations against him are “baseless.”

York Region police and Elections Ontario are investigating.

A file seen by the Post that appears to contain the pilfered customer lists says it was “last saved” by D-Media, a Dhillon company.

The Liberal party has quoted the organizer as saying that Sandhu, another client, passed on the stolen data to Jaswal. That never happened, the candidate stressed Wednesday.