Lawyers won’t face corruption charges

Two lawyers who were among the 36 people arrested along with former Laval mayor Gilles Vaillancourt more than three years ago have seen their cases dropped because it took too long to prosecute them.

According to provincial court records, the attorneys — Jean Bertrand, 64, and Robert Talbot, 77, both of Laval — saw a stay of proceedings placed on the charges they faced on Thursday. The two men were part of a group of more than a dozen who began presenting motions in late January before Superior Court Justice James Brunton, arguing they had waited too long for their case to go to trial.

Last summer, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled an accused should expect to wait no longer than 30 months for a Superior Court case to go to trial.

Bertrand and Talbot were arrested and charged in May 2013.

Bertrand was the former head of financing for Vaillancourt’s political party, PRO des Lavallois, and Talbot had served as a lawyer to Vaillancourt’s family in the past.

According to the Journal de Montréal, Brunton rejected similar requests made by 11 other people charged in the UPAC investigation dubbed Project Honorer that probed a system of collusion that allegedly affected many contracts awarded by Laval between 1996 and 2010. The newspaper reported Brunton determined the cases brought against Bertrand and Talbot were less complex than the others and could have been brought to trial in a matter of weeks.

Thirty-seven people were initially charged in Project Honorer and, following Brunton’s decision on Thursday, 31 still have cases pending. The accused will be broken up into two groups with trials beginning in September and October.

On Dec. 1, Vaillancourt pleaded guilty to being part of a conspiracy to commit fraud, and to fraud and breach of trust.

He agreed to reimburse the city of Laval more than $8.6 million. Vaillancourt was sentenced to a six-year prison term.