Catania didn’t provide bills, Contrecoeur trial hears
After Guy Hébert took over as head of the beleaguered Société d’habitation et de développement de Montréal (SHDM) in 2008 following irregularities in its sale of the city-owned Faubourg Contrecoeur land to a construction firm, he asked the firm’s president to show the bills detailing what had been spent on the land decontamination that taxpayers were financing.
“Over my dead body,” was the answer from Paolo Catania on one of the occasions he asked him to provide the bills, Hébert testified at the fraud and conspiracy trial linked to the land sale on Monday.
Catania is on trial by judge alone with four other former executives of Construction Frank Catania et Associés Inc. and Frank Zampino, who was the No. 2 politician at city hall at the time of the sale. They were arrested by Quebec’s anticorruption squad, UPAC, in 2012. The company is also on trial.
Catania eventually provided a CD with the bills, Hébert testified, adding that he had them analyzed by an outside firm.
However, “they weren’t good enough quality,” Hébert said. At another point in his testimony, Hébert said the documents on the CD were incomplete.
Hébert succeeded Martial Fillion as executive director of the SHDM following Fillion’s dismissal by the agency’s board after it hit news headlines that the 38-hectare tract of disused land in east-end Montreal had been sold at a heavily discounted price to Construction Frank Catania et Associés the previous year. The land was sold for an 1,800-unit housing development worth $300 million.
Among other irregularities cited by previous witnesses, Fillion awarded consulting contracts without holding a required call for bids by invitation and wrote cheques for loans to the Catania firm without the SHDM board’s prior approval.
Fillion was arrested with the others, but died in 2013.
Most of the $14.7-million discount that Fillion agreed to from the $19.1-million price offered by the Catania firm for the Contrecoeur land was to cover decontamination, the trial has heard.
Hébert, a career civil servant who later briefly served as city manager of Montreal, told the court that he was sent in by then-mayor Gérald Tremblay to clean up the SHDM.
While he asked for the decontamination bills, Hébert also hired a soil decontamination expert to validate an initial study for the SHDM estimating the decontamination costs that had been conducted by a firm hired by Fillion before the land sale.
The expert, Martin Durocher, also testified on Monday. He said he came up with the figure of $7.3 million, before taxes, which was below the $11 million that was discounted for decontamination from the sale price.
However, the defence presented several reports suggesting that more work related to decontamination was required after Durocher provided his services to the SHDM in 2008.
Hébert, meanwhile, said under cross-examination that prior to his arrival, the SHDM’s board had instructed an accounting firm it had hired to audit the Contrecoeur project not to examine the actions of the SHDM board in its audit.
A former SHDM board member testified last week that board members had “blind trust” in Fillion.