How the Justice System Treats the
Criminal Acts of SNC-Lavalin

While workers, including construction workers and their unions, pay the price for corporate and state corruption, SNC Lavalin and its top executives fare very well before the courts when they do face charges.

The best-known case is that of Pierre Duhaime, who was the CEO of SNC-Lavalin at the time of the McGill University Health Centre (MUHC) corruption scandal. SNC-Lavalin paid $22.5 million in bribes to two leading MUHC officials to win the $1.34 billion contract for the public-private partnership construction of the new university hospital in 2010. The bribes were paid to these two MUHC executives through companies registered to them. During the hearings of the Charbonneau Commission, this scheme was described as the biggest corruption fraud in Canadian history.

There were 15 charges originally lodged against SNC-Lavalin's former CEO by the Quebec Director of Criminal and Penal Prosecutions, including fraud and corruption. On February 1, right in the middle of the SNC imbroglio, Duhaime accepted a plea deal in which 14 of the charges were dropped. He pleaded guilty only to a charge of breach of trust by not intervening when he was aware that a criminal act was being committed, namely assisting the former Deputy Director General of the MUHC to rig the tender so that SNC-Lavalin was awarded the contract over a competing consortium. In return for the tender being awarded to SNC-Lavalin, bribes were paid to the two MUHC officials.

Pierre Duhaime was not sentenced to jail, but to 20 months' house arrest which he will serve in his luxury home, with increasingly flexible conditions over the 20 months, and one year's probation. He will also have to do 240 hours of community service and make a $200,000 donation to the Centre for Victims of Crime.

In July 2018, also in connection with the MUHC's corruption scandal, former vice-president of SNC-Lavalin's construction division, Riadh Ben Aissa, was convicted on a reduced charge of using false documents. Fifteen other charges against him were dropped. He was sentenced to 51 months in prison. He only spent one day in prison because the court included in the 51 months' detention the months he had already spent in jail in Switzerland on another charge related to bribes paid by SNC-Lavalin to Libyan officials during the early 2000s.

Also, the same month, SNC-Lavalin's financial controller, Stéphane Roy, was acquitted on two counts of fraud and the use of false documents related to the same case, after the prosecution simply announced that it would not present any evidence against him.

Finally, for now, in February a former SNC-Lavalin executive and his lawyer obtained a stay of proceedings on charges of attempting to bribe a witness. Sami Abdellah Bebawi and his attorney, Constantine Kyres, had been charged with attempting to bribe Riadh Ben Aissa to change his testimony regarding crimes that SNC-Lavalin was alleged to have committed in Libya. The stay of proceedings was decided in accordance with the 2016 Supreme Court of Canada Jordan decision, according to which the length of judicial proceedings must not exceed two and a half years in the Superior Court, except in exceptional circumstances. The two men were charged in 2014.

In November 2018 another former vice-president of SNC-Lavalin, Normand Morin, pleaded guilty to two of five charges relating to illegal contributions to two federal political parties, the Liberal Party and the Conservative Party, between 2004 and 2011. SNC-Lavalin created a "straw man" scheme whereby employees contributed to the parties and were reimbursed by the company. The fraudulent manoeuvre brought in about $117,000 to these two parties. The Crown dropped the remaining three charges. Morin was fined $2,000. Since the former executive, who asserted he was a scapegoat in this case, had pleaded guilty before the case went to trial, and as he was the only accused in the case, others having escaped prosecution through a 2016 settlement agreement worked out with Elections Canada, the prosecution stops there and we will never know which constituencies, which candidates or which party leadership candidates received donations from SNC-Lavalin. The guilty plea concludes the investigation by the Commissioner of Elections Canada into SNC-Lavalin. The engineering firm itself admitted to the Commissioner that it had made illegal contributions, but it did so without penalty through the 2016 settlement agreement with Elections Canada. The amounts received illegally were remitted to the federal authorities by the political parties concerned.

SNC-Lavalin has always maintained that the corrupt acts were committed by isolated individuals who are no longer part of the organization. The facts over the years reveal systemic corruption involving state and government officials and the courts, including less than vigorous prosecution, dropped charges and light sentences.

This article was published in

Volume 49 Number 7 - March 2, 2019

Article Link:
How the Justice System Treats the Criminal Acts of SNC-Lavalin

    

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