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The matter will now have to be resolved in Federal Court, where the NDP’s suit to overturn the board’s ruling has been languishing for almost two years.

The suit was suspended almost immediately after it was launched at the request of both sides as they took a first stab at negotiating an out-of-court settlement. Those talks went nowhere and the board’s lawyer, Guy Pratte, asked last May that the suspension be lifted.

Pratte has since filed a motion to dismiss the case on the grounds that the court has no jurisdiction to second-guess decisions of the board. A hearing was scheduled for this May but, at the request of the NDP’s lawyer, that has been delayed until Sept. 13.

In the meantime, sources say the Commons administration has refused to pay some expense claims defeated NDP MPs have submitted to cover the costs of moving and shutting down their offices.

Just how much money has been recovered in that manner is unclear. NDP insiders suggest it’s around $40,000 but others say it’s considerably more than that

Just how much money has been recovered in that manner is unclear. NDP insiders suggest it’s around $40,000 but others say it’s considerably more than that.

New Democrats have maintained from the outset that administrators wildly inflated the amount of money each MP contributed from their office budgets to the salaries of the satellite office employees.

That appears to have been borne out in about half a dozen cases where New Democrats have challenged the amount they’d been told to repay.

Former Toronto MP Dan Harris was ordered to repay $141,467 but was effectively exonerated by the Commons’ chief financial officer shortly after the election. Harris has said his initial bill included three years of salary for an employee who’d spent only 13 days working out of a short-lived party office in Toronto.

Similarly, former Montreal MP Isabelle Morin was initially ordered to repay $169,117 in salary paid to an employee. Her bill has been reduced to just less than $30,000 because the employee worked most of the time in her riding office, not the Montreal party office.