More than half the time, the Ontario labour minister’s office overrode the opinions of non-partisan staff to dole out around $750 million in grants to a multi-billion-dollar job training fund, according to the province’s Auditor General’s report released Wednesday.

Many of those successful lower-ranked applications to the Skills Development Fund (SDF) were backed by lobbyists, whose projects received $126 million in funding, raising a spectre of possible preferential treatment, the report said — all of it a significant expansion of concerns about the troubled fund.