Arts Undergraduate Society Vice-President Events Nampande Londe resigned her position on Tuesday, citing personal reasons.

Londe had recently come under fire for allowing Arts Frosh to run a budget deficit and faced the possibility that AUS Council would impeach her. But she and AUS President Dave Marshall denied that this was the reason for her resignation.

“Confusion has come out of all this, at least the perception is that she resigned as a result of this unfortunate deficit,” Marshall said. “[But] she’s no longer a student at McGill, so she is ineligible to be the vice-president events and she had to resign.”

Marshall also denied that the AUS was planning to impeach Londe, although the decision to do so was ultimately in the hands of AUS Council.

“Right off the bat, even though, of course, as a body we were discussing a variety of different ways of taking responsibility for this, there was no plan to go ahead with an impeachment,” Marshall said.

Londe, on the other hand, never considered resigning, but conceeded that impeachment did cross her mind after AUS realized Frosh had run a deficit.

“I stood by what we did, you impeach someone because they do something unlawful, wrong, or unethical,” she said. “There was nothing unethical about opening up Frosh to more kids or restricting it to first years in the Faculty of Arts. It was a risk that we took in consultation with the Frosh coordinators.”

AUS executives first became aware of the deficit in the aftermath of Frosh. The event, they said, did not actually run over budget. Instead not enough first-years registered for the event to break even.

“From all the information that we had there was no reason to predict that it was not going to work,” she said. “[What went wrong] in my opinion was mostly that we had a stricter policy regarding who was allowed to register.”

In addition, Londe explained that there are no institutionalized procedure within AUS regarding the way budgets are done, and how records are kept to make sure information is passed on to future years.

“It seems that in previous years there was just this sort of idea that it didn’t matter which events were over budget so long as at the end of the year they broke even,” she said. “My policy going out of Frosh was that any event that should be put out there should cover its own expenses.”

As for future events in the AUS portfolio, both Marshall and Londe said they will not be affected, mainly because the vast majority of AUS services are funded through independent fees.

“We did run a deficit for frosh, but the way AUS is run, that is not going to affect the rest of student services for the year,” Londe said. “Also the details of the budget are never looked back at, so this does not mean that the rest of the events are not going to be less quality events.

“I feel [that] people sometimes have a tendency to jump to conclusion and get really agitated about things before having enough facts to have a real perspective of what’s going on,” she added. “AUS is still taking steps towards making sure that no other events this year run a deficit.”

The AUS wiill hold a by-election at their council meeting on Wednesday to fill the VP events position.