Fraud trial begins for former head of Sûreté du Québec
Two people who secretly kept records of what eventually produced fraud and breach of trust accusations to be brought against Richard Deschênes, the former director general of the Sûreté du Québec, and two of his officers felt very uncomfortable in having done so.
This is how Michel Marsan, an investigator who was part of a special team assembled late in 2012 specifically to investigate Deschênes and SQ officers Steve Chabot and Alfred Tremblay, described the reactions of two of the first witnesses he met at the start of the probe.
Marsan, the first witness called in the trial of all three men on Tuesday, had just retired from the Montreal police in 2012 and was about to take a job as an investigator with the National Bank when he was asked to join the team. He was sworn in at the Montreal courthouse in December 2012 and met with one of the whistleblowers who worked for the SQ the following day.
“He seemed relieved to be transferring the documents to someone. He had kept it secret (for two years),” Marsan said of his meeting with the whistleblower at the SQ’s headquarters on Parthenais St. in Montreal.
Deschênes had announced he was stepping down as head of the SQ two months earlier. Media are not allowed to publish the whistleblower’s name because of a publication ban ordered by Quebec Court Judge Josée Bélanger.
The whistleblower was aware that two cheques had been requested from an account called Special Operations Expenses, which was supposed to for keeping secret any spending the SQ made for informants used to investigate organized crime. According to evidence heard from the same whistleblower in the trial of another SQ officer, he started to question the legitimacy of Chabot and Tremblay’s requests for the money because the amounts on the cheques somewhat matched their annual salaries. Chabot, a former deputy-director, and Tremblay, a former chief-inspector, were about to retire when they received the cheques.
The whistleblower handed Marsan copies of the forms Chabot and Tremblay filled out before the cheques were issued to them. Marsan said another witness he met with days later also expressed concerns over having kept evidence of alleged wrongdoing by an officer as high up in the SQ as Chabot.
“He kept them in a binder at his home. He was uncomfortable to have kept them,” Marsan said of the other witness.
In his opening statement to the judge on Tuesday, prosecutor Antoine Piché said Deschênes was the only person who could have authorized the first cheque issued, for more than $167,000, to Chabot; the second cheque, for more than $78,000, was issued to Tremblay, and only Chabot or Deschênes could have authorized the expense.
Piché said that no matter what the cheques were actually used to cover, the money should not have been drawn from the Special Operations Expenses fund.
All three of the accused tried to have a stay of proceedings placed on their cases based on the Jordan ruling. They argued that it took the Crown too long to bring their cases to trial, but a judge rejected those requests last week.
The trial is scheduled to continue on until May 26.
All three of the accused are charged with fraud, theft and breach of trust.