The Scandal, the Firing and the Fallout

Last March, somewhere deep in the Royal Bank of Canada’s gilded fortress at Front and Bay, an anonymous tip arrived like a thunderclap. Someone claimed to have seen RBC’s chief financial officer, Nadine Ahn, hugging and kissing the bank’s new vice-president, Ken Mason, as they exited the elevators at the Royal York hotel, just steps west of the company’s headquarters. Both were married with kids, but the complaint wasn’t about infidelity. Mason, the tipster knew, had been rapidly promoted, which came with a sizable bump in pay. The top tier of banking is cut-throat and laced with envy, and for good reason. High-ranking staff are paid handsomely, with a tantalizing buffet of stock options, benefits and other extras. As a VP, Mason’s annual perks allowance alone was $17,000. (Ahn’s was $40,000.) The tipster artfully transitioned from spilling alleged details to demanding some: Had Mason been promoted on merit or because he was cozy with the boss?

In most other lines of work, if the allegations are true, what often comes next is straightforward. The employee gets reprimanded or perhaps canned, maybe with cause, maybe without. The world of high finance is different. The entire banking industry—from the retail counter to the CEO’s desk—rests on a single bedrock question: Can I trust these people with my money? No bank survives unless the answer is yes, and they spend a fortune filling their ranks with risk managers, crisis specialists and spin doctors, all preoccupied with maintaining the veil of unimpeachability. (They also occasionally hire freelance copywriters. In the spirit of full disclosure: between 2016 and 2023, I wrote a handful of articles about personal finance—how to save for a goal, how to ask for a raise—for RBC.)

Against that risk-averse backdrop, the anonymous tip represented a problem folded into a scandal tucked inside a time bomb. It didn’t involve some inconsequential junior employee; it implicated the bank’s number two, who held sway over finance, taxation, performance management, investor relations, corporate treasury and corporate development. If true, the accusation could raise uncomfortable questions from influential ultra-high-net-worth clientele about Ahn’s judgment. If she was promoting people for reasons other than merit, what else might she be up to? And if she’d been behaving like this for many years, was something awry with RBC as a whole?

The accusation was exceptionally inopportune. Ahn was a star. She chaired RBC’s asset liability committee and played a part in establishing the company’s strategic direction. The bank was enjoying a breathtaking run of success, posting $15 billion in net income in 2023 alone. She helped steer RBC through the Covid crisis and oversaw the $13.5-billion acquisition of HSBC. A 52-year-old woman, she was also a powerful symbol that RBC wasn’t just another antiquated old boys’ club. The bank placed her on its enterprise diversity leadership council, and on International Women’s Day in 2024 she interviewed actor America Ferrera, who delivers the rallying feminist monologue in Barbie, about the importance of inclusion. VersaFi, an organization that promotes gender equity in the finance sector, once heralded Ahn as a “champion of change.”

It must have been tempting to ignore the tip, but that wasn’t an option. The bank was duty-bound to investigate its own. Quietly, without alerting Ahn or Mason, RBC engaged outside legal counsel from Norton Rose Fulbright and a team of investigators who launched a covert analysis of Ahn and Mason’s communications. By law, the company had the right to pore over a treasure trove of correspondence dating back a decade. It could even read communications transmitted over personal devices in cases where Ahn and Mason had copied their work accounts. Three weeks later, the company had seen enough to act. On April 4, RBC CEO Dave McKay requested that Ahn come to his office early the following day. When Ahn asked why, he didn’t answer. The next morning, Ahn’s 25th anniversary at RBC, she took the elevators to the upper floors, but instead of meeting McKay, she was directed into a room with an RBC lawyer and a representative from employee relations. After taking her laptop and work and personal phones, they delivered a devastating accusation: Ahn, they alleged, was in an “undisclosed close personal relationship” with a subordinate and had leveraged her position to help him secure a promotion and pay increases. Mason, who hours earlier had received an email from RBC’s chief risk officer, was having his own meeting. By that evening, both had been fired with cause.

The bank then issued a press release naming Ahn and specifying the reasons for her dismissal. Wedged in between paragraphs was an odd, telling tangent: “The investigation found no evidence of conduct by the former CFO or the other employee with respect to the bank’s previously issued financial statements, RBC’s strategy or its financial or business performance.” To any halfway-savvy reader, the line screamed damage control. The rot had been excised, the broader business unaffected. A scandal involving the bank’s prized CFO was bad, but now it was time to close ranks and limit the fallout. Pink slips issued, press release disseminated, RBC’s brain trust might have assumed the issue was settled. Instead, as they would soon learn, the chaos was only beginning.

The story of Nadine Ahn and Ken Mason, as told by RBC investigators, began in 2010. Ahn, who was hired 11 years earlier as a manager in corporate treasury, was a bright and ambitious CPA with a commerce degree from the University of Toronto. In 2001, Mason had been transferred to corporate treasury from global markets, where he’d been an analyst, but it took almost a decade for the two to start working together directly. In August of 2013, they went out for drinks—a common occurrence in the high-pressure world of finance—for the first time. The following month, Mason drafted a poem he titled “Ode to Cocktails,” in which he called Ahn his “beautiful cocktail girl” and referenced a kiss, a touch and an elevator.

Little by little, the colleagues grew closer, exchanging thousands of messages over several years, not all of them about work. In June of 2015, a year and a half after Ahn was promoted into a new role outside corporate treasury, she sent Mason a middle-of-the-night message. “I cannot sleep…I tried to give you some space this week. I am not sure how much space to give you. I want to see you but I don’t want to pressure you,” she wrote. “I am afraid if I give you too much space I will never see you. For now I am waiting for you to approach me. Don’t forget I am here.” Mason promised he would have more time for Ahn soon. “Don’t worry,” he replied. “I won’t forget you.”

Ahn and Mason booked themselves for regular “liquidity meetings”—­sitting down over drinks at the Royal York or at Canoe. There, one night in May of 2016, they doodled on a coaster, filling it with references to plans they’d hatched together, including business travel, a concert, a night out, a visit to a winery, a Bills game, an LCBO tasting. Afterward, Mason pocketed the coaster, encased it in acrylic and kept it in his office. Over the next few years, their friendship deepened. In one 2019 exchange, Ahn messaged Mason to say, “I love you.” He quickly returned the sentiment: “I love you too.” Mason took to calling Ahn “Prickly Pear,” an apparent nod to her sometimes abrasive nature; she called Mason “KD,” short for Kraft Dinner, a reference to how North American he was despite his ­Italian heritage. Ahn sent Mason romantic poetry that included one passage about falling in love with someone at first sight. In 2023, Mason ordered two hardcover copies of a 43-page album from a website called LoveBookOnline dedicated to their deep friendship. Created to mark his and Ahn’s 10-year anniversary on August 16, the book tracks the trajectory of their relationship, with ­statements that include “I love you,” “You are my best friend,” “The best part about us is what’s still to come,” and “Prickly Pear and KD lived happily ever after.”

In its 30-page employee code of conduct, RBC emphasizes the importance of disclosing what it calls close personal relationships, including romantic partners, family, business partners and roommates. The idea is to avoid a situation in which decisions are made to favour anyone or anything except the business. Most of it is predictable, but in practice there are grey areas. It offers little guidance, for example, on workplace acquaintances that evolve into deeper friendships. In an era when “work husband” and “work wife” are parts of the lexicon, when over­extended employees answer emails over dinner with their kids, work during the weekend and sometimes even sleep at the office, policy and reality can read as contradictory. At what point exactly does a workplace friendship become a “close” one? Inevitably, the longer a work relationship continues, the better a boss knows their staff and is therefore more likely to advocate for them when they are confident in their skills. Is that so wrong?

In RBC’s view, yes, maybe. To be safe, it recommends that staff err on the side of disclosing to HR—despite how unwieldy it might be for every close friendship among the bank’s almost 100,000 employees to be reported. A section in the code called “Speaking Up” directs employees to a “conduct hotline” where they can tell on their colleagues for seeming too chummy or otherwise violating the rules. Over the years, Ahn took at least a dozen training sessions that would have touched on the code. And the higher she rose, the greater the expectation was that she would adhere to it. Once she became CFO, she executed a “senior officer attestation” that confirmed there were no conflicts of interest that might interfere with her ability to perform her duties with integrity.

Mason, like Ahn, was ambitious. Starting in 2017, when he was working as a managing director in corporate treasury, he created a document titled “Project Ken,” which outlined a plan to grow his compensation and secure him a position as vice-president. It turned out to be prophetic. In 2020, Mason earned $695,000, sitting three rungs below Ahn on the corporate ladder. Then, in September of 2021, the bank announced that Ahn was being promoted to CFO. Around the same time that news became official, Mason, with the alleged knowledge and support of Ahn, asked his immediate bosses for a raise to $835,000. RBC believes Ahn and Mason had started talking about restructuring corporate treasury personnel to accomplish Mason’s aims, and in a way that might avoid the scrutiny of human resources, once Ahn was elevated to the CFO role. Both Ahn and Mason dispute the bank’s version of events.

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At first, Ahn flatly denied everything. But, as the stack of evidence grew, she relented, just slightly. She and Mason were “very good” and “close” friends, she admitted

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What is known: in November, Ahn emailed the VP of human resources to advocate for Mason’s request and suggested an even bigger payout. One of Mason’s superiors expressed concerns that the bump would result in over­compensation for Mason relative to his peers. That year, his total take-home rose to $950,000, an increase of 38 per cent, though $180,000 of that was a bank-performance bonus. The next year, he took home $1.1 million—an increase of 58 per cent in just two years.

Mason’s managers were perplexed. They didn’t understand why the bank’s CFO was involving herself in the remuneration of someone significantly lower than her in the corporate hierarchy. In a meeting with the bank’s new treasurer in 2023, Ahn circled Mason’s name on a piece of paper. The message, according to RBC, was clear: make him a vice-president. And in November of that year, that’s exactly what happened. His compensation jumped to $1.18 million—an increase of 70 per cent, with bank-­performance bonuses factored in, since Ahn became CFO.

The truth, in the view of RBC’s investigators, was undeniable: Ahn and Mason had struck up a close personal relationship; deepened it over cocktails, lunches and other meet-ups; and then hatched a plan to engineer Mason’s rise through the company. All of it was a clear violation of the codes that Ahn had signed time and again.

That’s not how Ahn saw it. Sitting in that upper-floor boardroom on April 5, listening to the barrage of accusations, she must have been horrified. This wasn’t how she had envisioned her 25th anniversary at RBC. Yet there she was, staring at a binder containing a curated selection of her historical communications and being made to comment on each cringe-inducing exchange. For two hours, the investigators pressed their theory. At first, Ahn flatly denied everything. But, as the stack of evidence grew, she relented, just slightly. She and Mason were “very good” and “close” friends, she admitted. In a fiercely competitive corporate world, they had turned to each other when they needed a little understanding or a laugh between meetings. Their back-and-forth was almost all tongue in cheek, she claimed. And the idea that they’d been anything but professional was preposterous.

In a separate office, Mason was issuing his own denials. Some of the messages between the two looked bad, he conceded, but it was just jokey banter between colleagues. He dismissed a message that described him sitting in bed beside Ahn as “hyperbole” and blushed at others. “I feel embarrassed looking at this stuff,” he said. “I should not have been saying some of these words.” Within hours of the meetings, they were both terminated—no option to resign quietly, no severance.

The RBC press release that followed was a scarlet letter. Ahn was called out for violating the company code of conduct by carrying on with another, unnamed employee and getting him “preferential treatment including promotion and compensation increases.” Within 48 hours, the Globe and Mail ran a lengthy article that did name Mason and laid out the gossip circulating at RBC over his rise and Ahn’s role in it, replete with insinuations about the exact nature of their supposed friendship. Both employees’ lives had been flipped upside down. They’d gone from gainfully employed to seeing their reputations in tatters. Still, they had a choice: accept their fate or fight back.

Squaring off against Canada’s wealthiest company was a daring step, even for someone who believes she was wrongfully dismissed. But Howard Levitt, senior partner at the Toronto employment law firm Levitt LLP, says he can think of two good reasons to do it. “One is if you’re fired for cause. That looks really bad,” he says. “You sue so that it muddies the water about whether there really was cause.” The second reason is much more personal and speculative. Perhaps Ahn had insisted to her husband that her relationship with Mason was platonic. “So, the partner then says, prove it,” says Levitt. “Sue them.”

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Whatever the motivation, Ahn threw her counterpunch on August 8, suing for wrongful dismissal, defamation and other claims. The case against her, she said, had been distorted, the evidence cherry-picked. The real story was nuanced and exonerating, and it needed to be heard. Ahn took issue with the nature of the interrogation, which she likened to an ambush. She was given no advance notice and wasn’t supplied a written list of the accusations against her. She complained that on April 5 RBC hadn’t told her she had the right to consult a lawyer—although the bank was under no legal obligation to do so.

As for the specific accusations about her and Mason’s relationship, she would later provide an itemized set of explanations. The messages that suggested romance were nothing of the sort. She and Mason were in a book club and both loved poetry, especially Shakespeare, and enjoyed trading sonnets. She had said she loved Mason, yes, but she frequently told her female friends that she loved them too. Of the time she reached out to Mason in the middle of the night worrying about him forgetting her: it was because she was stressed in a new role and missed her former colleagues. As for the nicknames, she claimed her co-workers were known for giving out nicknames; hers wasn’t unique, and it wasn’t romantic. Ahn said she had never heard of any LoveBook, and a coaster encased in plastic was news to her too. Moreover, they couldn’t have been seen at the Royal York because it never happened. They were friends, full stop. Anything else was a fabrication.

Mason filed suit the same day. He would likewise claim that their relationship was professional and violated no codes of conduct. He explained that his desire to recognize their shared work anniversary wasn’t unusual. In fact, he observed similar milestones with many colleagues. He conceded that the way he did it, with a LoveBook, was silly and unprofessional—and that’s exactly why he kept it to himself and didn’t share it with Ahn. Even the coaster, he said, was a distant memory. He claimed to have forgotten the reasons he’d kept it.

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RBC had surreptitiously reviewed more than a decade’s worth of its senior staff’s correspondence. Neck-craning Bay Streeters were reminded they too had signed the same or similar contracts

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Both rejected the notion that Ahn had orchestrated Mason’s rise through the company. RBC’s apparent smoking gun, the Project Ken document, Mason argued, had nothing to do with Ahn, and he had never shared it with her. It was, instead, a list of personal talking points to use in case he needed to advocate for himself in the event of a conversation with the treasurer about a company realignment. He had been steadily pushing for performance-related salary increases as early as 2005, long before Project Ken. He argued that his compensation increases were in line with those of other employees. Mason pointed to years of exemplary performance reviews, a handful of industry accolades, and the fact that he’d been trusted to advise the federal government on debt and bond structure. He added that he had developed an innovative new funding structure that saved the bank $100 million a year. His work ethic, he continued, was superlative, evidenced by a decade’s worth of unused vacation time between 2014 and 2024, equating to $565,000. In that light, his salary increases were more than reasonable: they were a bargain.

Ahn’s claims dovetailed with Mason’s. She noted that much of the supposedly indicting communication gathered by RBC predated her promotion to CFO in 2021 and therefore happened prior to her ability to meaningfully affect Mason’s compensation. Once she became CFO, she says she and Mason had a more arms-length friendship. As for the defamation claim, securities law requires RBC to transparently report major operational changes—and firing a CFO under a cloud of suspicion certainly qualified. At the same time, employers must act in good faith when employees are terminated, and that includes avoiding public disparagement. In her suit, Ahn deemed the manner of the firing to be humiliating and vindictive. The bank had gone out of its way to destroy her reputation, she claimed, and rendered her unemployable.

Both Ahn and Mason went on the offensive. Ahn claimed that RBC’s investigation and her consequent dismissal were influenced by “gender-based stereotyping”—the idea that men and women in the workplace can’t be close, affectionate, platonic friends. Mason charged that RBC, like all banks, was an old boys’ club full of cronyism and double standards. If Ahn were male, he argued, no one would have objected to them having regular drinks. And if a male leader had forged a close personal relationship with a junior colleague, no one would be reprimanded, much less fired. Regular drinks between a man and a woman, however, were perceived as scandalous—another sign of the industry’s outdated attitude.

At least some of the Bay Street insiders I spoke to agreed. They see a gender hypocrisy in banking, where one set of rules exists for men, especially senior, high-ranking ones, who routinely pick favourites and spend time building intimacy over cigars and scotch, while a second, different set of rules applies to women. “There’s this expectation that women have to be perfect and have to be nice to everyone, and you can’t offend anyone,” says Kathryn Marshall, an employment lawyer in Toronto. “Men in the workplace, especially in the C-suite, don’t get judged on their private life. They get judged on their performance.”

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To drive home her point, Ahn later cited the example of RBC’s former CFO, a man she alleged was good friends with his subordinate, the bank’s treasurer, who lived with him during the pandemic. He’d had the power to influence the former treasurer’s compensation and in fact had overseen a pay increase. “RBC did not treat this workplace friendship between two males as a ‘close personal relationship’ or conflict of interest according to its code of conduct,” her claim alleges.

Their futures seemingly dashed, both Mason and Ahn wanted the bank to pay. Mason claimed $20 million. Ahn demanded nearly $49 million in damages: $11,709,375 for wrongful dismissal, $5,115,346 for lost share vesting, $441,145 for lost bonus, $100,000 for lost perquisite bonus, moral damages of $1 million, $500,000 for the infliction of mental distress, $20 million for defamation and “worldwide reputation harm” caused by the press release, and $10 million in punitive damages. It was, she believed, the very least she deserved for the total destruction of her reputation.

Bay Street was positively frothy at the news of the fracas; text chains and hushed conversations fixated on the tawdriness of it all. As one employment lawyer bluntly put it to me, “Were they banging or not?” But beyond the lurid speculation was a chilling reminder of the spectre of corporate surveillance. After all, RBC had surreptitiously reviewed more than a decade’s worth of its senior staff’s correspondence. Neck-craning Bay Streeters were reminded that they, too, had signed the same or similar contracts. In 2023, the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada updated its workplace privacy guidelines for the first time in 19 years, to better reflect the new digital landscape. Those changes carved out some protections for employees around consent, and employers are bound by privacy principles and must justify their actions. But, ultimately, when the collection of communications is necessary to terminate an employee, companies have significant leeway so long as their monitoring “is limited to purposes that are specific, targeted and appropriate in the circumstances.”

With both cases laid out in legalese, the matter became a study in confirmation bias. Depending on whose side you were on, the evidence was either damning or exonerating. In one exchange from 2021, Ahn had told Mason how to keep text messages from popping up on his phone while it was on the lock screen. Later, Ahn messaged Mason, whom she was set to meet, saying, “Stay where you are,” then sent him a follow-up note once her husband had left. RBC interpreted both actions to mean their relationship was something to hide and was therefore inappropriately close. Ahn claimed that, at the time, she and her husband, who knew she was communicating with Mason, were waiting in line for Covid vaccines in the rain, and she didn’t want Mason to get wet. Both were plausible. Who was right?

Big banks, it turns out, don’t like to get pushed around. Ahn had dared RBC to prove its claims—a potentially risky bluff, if it was one, since the bank was sitting on reams of personal messages between Ahn and Mason. Sure enough, eight days after Ahn filed suit, the bank filed a defence and counterclaim stuffed with the same eye-popping evidence that investigators had shown Ahn and Mason in person. Texts, emails, nicknames, affectionate sign-offs, cocktail scheduling notes and other earnest, sentimental messages were catapulted into the public domain. On August 23, the bank launched a counter­claim against Mason as well. It was mortifying for Ahn and Mason but just as bad a look for RBC, its dirty ­laundry hung out in public for all to see. The financial industry gobbled it up. Articles about the ordeal appeared in the Financial Post, Reuters, Yahoo News, Bloomberg, Fortune and on CBC and CTV News. The scandal was discussed on podcasts and dissected across social media. On a Reddit thread dedicated to the matter, posters skewered Ahn and Mason, calling them “morons” who had been felled by “pure entitlement and delusion.”

In its counterclaims, the bank went after both employees financially. Among other things, it demanded from Mason a reimbursement of more than $1.14 million in what it said was ill-gotten advancement. It also demanded more than $3 million in compensation related to performance-based shares and incentives, as well as gains on RBC stock options, to be repaid by Ahn, and it asked for both Ahn’s and Mason’s claims to be dismissed. Moreover, RBC claimed that the scandal had created a cascading chain of calamities: when news of it broke, the bank’s former treasurer, whom Ahn had fired without cause (to improve the “negative culture” in the division he oversaw, she said), threatened to sue RBC for bad faith termination. He alleged that he’d been fired to pave the way for Mason’s ascent to vice-president, which he would have opposed.

Optically, bad had devolved into horrible. The bank was now clawing back fees and doubling down on its claims. In November, determined to stay in the fight, Ahn expanded her legal team and brought in a second law firm. There have been no additional pleadings in Mason’s case since September, and no hearings are presently scheduled in either case. In other words, none of the allegations made by RBC, Ahn or Mason have been proven in court.

When I reached out to Gillian McArdle, RBC’s vice-president of corporate communications, she declined to answer questions, instead referring me to the bank’s pleading and then reading a lengthy prepared statement. The bank later provided a perfunctory response to written questions. I also reached out multiple times to both Ahn’s and Mason’s legal teams, who declined to make their clients available to me. Though both expressed concerns about my past work for RBC, neither commented on the case itself.

Six months after her dismissal, Ahn accepted a position as deputy chief financial officer for Canaccord Genuity, a major financial services firm with more than $100 billion in client assets. Ahn’s new position undercut her assertion that RBC’s “bad faith” firing had rendered her permanently toxic to employers. An insider who works with Canaccord told me the company felt it had scooped Ahn up at a considerable discount. “She’s smart, she’s astute…it’s a home run to get someone of this calibre.” Ahn had apparently insisted to her new employer that the relationship with Mason was strictly platonic, and they believed her.

As things stand, with the lawsuits pending, no one—not RBC, Ahn or Mason—is scoring points in the court of public opinion. Some industry insiders, eyebrows still arched over details of sonnets and LoveBooks and late-night confidences, may be wincing at Ahn and Mason’s public humiliation, but they also maintain that Ahn ought to have been aware of the power dynamics at play. For now, Bay Streeters are watching—knowing that they too are being watched—and waiting for the last word on a case that got messier and meaner than anyone could have imagined.

This story appears in the April 2025 issue of Toronto Life magazine. To subscribe, click here. To purchase single issues, click here.