Judge calls party fundraising ‘toxic’
THE CHARBONNEAU COMMISSION wraps up testimony for the summer, but not before hearing that the Quebec Liberal Party approved fundraising certificates for several people who were suspected of mob links or were embroiled in fraud and corruption probes. Moniq
The Charbonneau Commission has officially wrapped for the summer.
Justice France Charbonneau closed the spring session Wednesday afternoon, promising that she and her staff would continue working behind closed doors in the coming weeks and that they would return to the airwaves “on Sept. 2, at the latest.”
The high-profile inquiry will hear from several more witnesses this fall before moving on to a final phase of public consultations, which should wrap by Christmas.
The last witness of the 2014 spring session was former Quebec Liberal Party fundraising organizer Violette Trépanier, who spent two days answering questions about how her party raised money between 2001 and 2013.
On Wednesday, Trépanier acknowledged that the Liberals approved fundraising certificates for several people who were suspected of having links to the Mafia or who were embroiled in fraud and corruption probes.
Certificates were issued to construction bosses Lino Zambito, Paolo Catania and Giuseppe Borsellino, for example, and to former SNC-Lavalin executive Riahd Ben Aïssa (now detained in a Swiss prison). Rosaire Sauriol of engineering firm Dessau and his brother, Jean-Pierre Sauriol, also held certificates, as did France Michaud of Roche.
The documents, which were entered into evidence at the commission, allowed the executives to solicit donations on behalf of the Liberals between 2007 and 2009, and were perfectly legal.
Trépanier testified that it is “troubling” and “disappointing” that so many of the people she trusted to collect money were targeted by police investigations, but said it didn’t occur to her to revoke the certificates.
That response wasn’t good enough for Justice Charbonneau, who suggested that the whole thing reeked of corruption and political influence-peddling.
“It’s troubling, it’s even toxic,” said the judge.
“If we had to do this again, we’d do it differently. Well, we’d do the same, but call it something else.” VIOLETTE TREPANIER
As the day wore on, Trépanier was again questioned about so-called “sectoral financing.” She maintained that the Liberals solicited individuals within engineer- ing and construction companies, but never the companies themselves. Inquiry lawyer Paul Crépeau then confronted the witness with emails and documents linked to party fundraising events which listed the names of companies, not people.
A visibly uncomfortable Trépanier replied that these were simply cases of “bad wording.”
“If we had to do this again, we’d do it differently,” she testified. “Well, we’d do the same, but call it something else. We’d refer to individuals.”
Other inconsistencies — like the name on a cheque being changed or part of a donation being transferred from a father to his daughter in order to ensure the party respected the legal donation limit — were chalked up to “clerical errors” or simply “mistakes.”
Asked why people with links to the construction industry gave so much more to political parties in Quebec than any other group (like doctors, lawyers or veterinarians, for example), Trépanier said she had “no comment to make about that.”
But the Liberals apparently knew exactly who their biggest donors were and what they were looking for — namely, access to the cabinet. The party set higher fundraising targets for its ministers in the late 2000s ($100,000 per year) than for less-powerful MNAs ($50,000). Trépanier acknowledged on Wednesday that selling tickets to a fundraiser was easier when a transport or municipal affairs minister was scheduled to be present because engineering executives wanted face time with those people.
In total, the Quebec Liberal Party received $95 million in legal donations between 1996 and 2011, compared with $68 million collected by the Parti Québécois.
The Charbonneau Commission spent much of the spring session analyzing how the provincial government awarded public works and construction contracts, and how that process may have been linked to political financing. The inquiry’s final report, nearly four years in the making, is expected to land in April 2015.