Corporate records. On the sixth of March, 2025, I served a written demand for inspection of corporate books and records in my capacity as Corporate Secretary.
I hand-delivered it to Bart in his own office and he read it and he laughed and he said, “What, do you want to see how much you cost me?”
And he granted it. In writing. Same day.
I spent eleven days in a records room at Ashgrove Development Group with a company laptop and a scanner that the company provided, doing something I was legally entitled to do, and three people brought me coffee.
And the minutes. Which I wrote. Which record, in my own drafting, the board approving the cost proposals for all four task orders.
By the end of May I had it.
Defective pricing. Across four task orders between 2019 and 2024, ADG certified that subcontract pricing was competitively obtained from independent sources. On thirty-one packages it was not. They bid against themselves through two entities they controlled and took the spread.
Inflated cost to the government: eight million six hundred thousand dollars.
Small business set-aside. ADG won fourteen million two hundred thousand dollars of work reserved for small businesses through a pass-through entity called Vessel Point Contracting, then performed ninety-one percent of it in-house.
That one is not a technicality. That is the whole point of the programme, and there are small firms in this state that did not get that work.
On the eleventh of June, 2025, I filed a complaint under the False Claims Act, in the district court, on behalf of the United States.
That kind of complaint is filed under seal. The defendant is not told. Not for months. Sometimes years.
I filed it on the eleventh of June.
Rowland put the envelope on the kitchen island on the twenty-first of August.
Ten weeks later.
I need people to understand that, because it is the single most important fact in this story and it is the one everybody gets backwards.
I did not do this because he left me.
I did it in June, when we were still married, when I was still going to his mother’s for lunch on Sundays, when I had every reason in the world to want that company to be fine.
I did it because I spent seven years of my professional life putting people in prison for exactly this, and because on the eighteenth of October, 2024, I read a footer.
If he had never filed for divorce, that complaint would still have been filed and I would have had to sit at Corabelle’s table through the whole of it.
He just happened to leave in between.
Now. The red folder.
There was nothing in it about the False Claims Act case. There could not be. That case was under seal and disclosing its existence would have been a violation, and I was not going to hand them that.
The red folder was a divorce folder. And it was enough.
Exhibit 1. The corporate resolution of the ninth of April, 2019, appointing me Corporate Secretary of Ashgrove Development Group.
Exhibit 2. Forty-one sets of board minutes over six years, drafted and signed by me.
Exhibit 3. Nineteen corporate filings bearing my signature as an officer of the company.
Exhibit 4. Bart Ashgrove’s email of the third of April, 2019: put Rae on it, she’s the only one in this family who actually reads anything.
Exhibit 5. Six years of D&O insurance schedules naming me.
Exhibit 6. My compensation. One dollar per year. Six dollars total, and I attached the payments, because they actually paid them, which tells you everything about that family.
I handed a copy to the clerk and a copy across the aisle and I stood up.
I said: “Your Honour, the moving party asserts that my contribution to the marital enterprise was nominal and domestic.
“I have been an officer of Ashgrove Development Group since April of 2019. I have drafted and executed the corporate minutes of that company for six years. I am named on its D&O policy. I have signed nineteen of its filings.
“I have been compensated at one dollar a year.
“If my contribution was nominal, then the corporate governance of a company that turned over four hundred and ten million dollars last year has been nominal, and I would ask that the record reflect which of those two propositions the moving party would like to advance.”
