3rd Union Leader on Leave Amid Financial Inquiry
The Associated
Press August 31, 2008
Los Angeles - The executive vice president of the Service Employees International Union has stepped aside while accusations that she paid thousands of dollars in union money to a former boyfriend are being investigated, The Los Angeles Times reported Sunday.
The vice president, Annelle Grajeda, is the third major official of the union to be placed on leave in recent months amid accusations of misspending union money.
Ms. Grajeda was also president of the union's state council for California and president of the Los Angeles local, which represents 77,000 county workers.
She is on leave from all three positions, the union said.
On Saturday, The Times quoted Ms. Grajeda as saying she was "very confident" that she would be exonerated.
The union said it had demanded that her former companion, Alejandro Stephens, a former Los Angeles chapter president, return money he had received from the local and the state council.
Those entities paid him nearly $89,000 in consulting fees and "disbursements for official business" last year, according to the union's financial filings with the federal Department of Labor.
Two other union leaders were placed on leave recently amid accusations that the group's largest local, United Long-Term Care Workers, misspent $1 million of members' dues.
The local, which represents thousands of health care employees, is the subject of federal inquiries into payments made to companies owned by relatives of the local's president, Tyrone Freeman. Mr. Freeman and his former chief of staff, Rickman Jackson, who now heads the Michigan local, are both on leave.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/01/us/01SEIU.html?_r=1&ref=us&oref=slogin
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