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“The accusations against me are all part of crooked party politics inside the UCP,” Gill said.

After the Carruthers report was issued, Gill said Tuesday, he was told the UCP would “use its massive financial resources to bankrupt me in the courts” if he fought to defend his name.

“In my weakness I caved and agreed to quietly sit as an independent. But by not defending myself to my fullest ability I left the impression that I had done something wrong,” he said.

Gill said allegations of ballot impropriety occurred after he was ordered by a UCP operative to run only in “ethnically Indian areas in Calgary” following a boundary redraw of his Calgary-Greenway riding.

“We all know that politics can be dirty and that leaders and their back-room operatives in the establishment parties have run the process for their own interests. The Tory elite bosses of today are as bad as they have ever been,” Gill said.

‘I am unable to accept Mr. Gill’s position’

The report at the heart of Gill’s departure from the UCP was never released publicly, but Postmedia obtained a copy Tuesday.

In it, Carruthers outlines something of a he-said-she-said affair, in which a volunteer described seeing Gill remove a pile of ballots and asked him to return them.

Gill “absolutely denied” taking the ballots, Carruthers wrote, but the retired judge found “on a balance of probabilities” that the MLA removed them.

Carruthers concluded while he didn’t know where the ballots went, he was “unable to accept Mr. Gill’s position.”

Gill said nothing in the report contradicts what he said in the legislature.

Matt Solberg, UCP director of communications, said Gill’s accusations are “without merit.”

“The circumstances of his departure from the UCP caucus are well known and were well reported,” Solberg wrote in an email.

“It’s clear that this is a situation of sour grapes.”

egraney@postmedia.com

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