Tony Accurso to testify he was unaware of schemes
‘Those at the top don’t always know what’s going on at the bottom’
Construction entrepreneur Antonio Accurso concedes two of his companies were involved in a collusion and kickback scheme run out of Laval’s city hall for years, but will testify any participation in the schemes was handled by people lower than him in his organization.
In a statement made to the jury hearing Accurso’s criminal trial at the Laval courthouse, defence lawyer Marc Labelle characterized his client as someone who was expanding a series of companies he owned into an international business and therefore had little time to be concerned with obtaining municipal infrastructure contracts in Laval.
“Those at the top do not always know what’s going on at the bottom,” Labelle said while outlining a defence where it appears clear Accurso will say his cousin, Giuseppe Molluso, 74, the former president of Louisbourg Construction, and Frank Minicucci, a president of Simard Beaudry Inc., were responsible for obtaining municipal contracts in Laval.
The 65-year-old faces a series of charges alleging he was part of a system of collusion that plagued the city between 1996 and 2010. Accurso is on trial on five criminal charges in all, including conspiracy, fraud and breach of trust. The conspiracy charge alleges he was part of a plot that involves dozens of people, including former Laval mayor Gilles Vaillancourt, the city’s former director general, Claude Asselin, and its former head of engineering, Claude Deguise.
“Laval was a part but just a piece of something much bigger,” Labelle said, while adding that, during the period in question, Accurso was expanding Louisbourg Construction, Simard Beaudry Inc. and Hyperscon (a company he sold in 2010) to a point where they were obtaining $60-million contracts in Algeria and Libya for work that made replacing sewers in Laval appear tiny by comparison.
Labelle said Accurso will testify about his longtime friendship with Asselin and that their relationship stretched into the period when the collusion scheme ran.
Labelle said Accurso will testify that Asselin mentioned the scheme (where companies paid back two per cent of the contracts they were awarded to people like Vaillancourt) to him on only two occasions.
Labelle told the jury Accurso will say he reacted by telling Asselin: “I could lose everything I have if I get caught up in a big scandal.”
Accurso is expected to testify this week. His oldest son, James, an engineer who worked for both Louisbourg Construction and as a vice-president at Simard Beaudry, was the first defence witness to take the stand on Monday.
He said his father was perceived as “the chairman of the board” of the companies he owned and that much of his work involved securing financing from banks for largescale projects like the expansion of the operations of Aluminerie Alouette in Sept-Îles. The company wanted to double its size and one of Accurso’s companies won the contract to blast and excavate the land involved. The project involved having 500 workers on the site, James Accurso said.
“He was the chairman of everything that involved financing. He was very active on that side of things,” the son said, while describing his own work as being an onsite manager of Simard Beaudry’s major projects.
James Accurso also said it was clear to him that Molluso and Minicucci had “complete autonomy” over the companies they ran for his father.
Both he and Labelle said Molluso was with Louisbourg before Antonio Accurso took it over when his father died in 1981.
“(Molluso) was the master of his company,” James Accurso said.
“And what about Minicucci?” Labelle asked.
“The same thing,” Accurso said, then added later: “I never heard Frank or Joe say, ‘well now I have to talk to your father’ (before making an important decision).”