More parents take the stand

Photo: Colin Dacre

The parade of parents to the witness stand claiming to have been defrauded in the Penticton hockey dorm fiasco continued Monday as the trial entered its second week.

Mike Elphicke is facing fraud charges in connection to a European youth hockey tour that never occurred, planned by the defunct Okanagan Elite Hockey Association.

A Canada-wide warrant is out for the arrest of his co-accused, Loren Reagan, who failed to show up for the start of the trial and is believed to be in Kuwait.

Sunshine Coast hockey-dad Robert Blake testified Monday about being pitched the trip by Reagan while he was in town for his son’s tryouts at the Okanagan Hockey Academy.

He said he paid a $2,000 nonrefundable deposit, and expected to fundraise to make up the remainder of the $5,500 total cost per child.

“It was a lot of money, which I couldn’t afford, so we fundraised like a son-of-a-gun,” he said, adding that he travelled to Penticton “at least twice a month” and sold raffle tickets at Cherry Lane shopping mall.

Blake testified that he wrote a cheque for $1,000 to pay off the balance of the trip, and loaned Reagan $2,000 in cash unrelated to the trip that was never repaid.

In all, he was already $5,000 in when he said he was contacted by Elphicke in an email explaining that Elphicke and his wife would no longer running the trip, and parents would need to contribute more money — $9,000 in Blake’s case — to get to Europe.

Reagan had already pulled out of the trip at that point.

“There were emails flying back between Mike and Loren, they were pretty heavy-duty emails, about who was to blame for everything falling apart,” Blake said, who added he declined to contribute any more money.

During opening statements last week, Crown prosecutor Patrick Fullerton said he will prove funds ended up in Reagan’s personal bank account, funded part of the failed hockey dorm project near the SOEC, and paid Elphicke a salary, who managed an unlicensed raffle.

It is alleged the two men defrauded parents out of around $130,000.

The defence has been trying to paint the fraud was a one-man operation, orchestrated by Reagan. 

Another hockey parent, Troy Clifford, testified earlier in the morning about intense pressure to fundraise for the trip.

Prior to pulling his child out due in part to financial constraints, he felt a “general uneasiness” with how things were being run.

“There was just something wrong, and it was starting to get, the emails and the aggression was really starting to just not sit well."

The trial is expected to run into next week.