Defence files new motion to halt, declare mistrial in Contrecoeur case
A new defence motion to either halt the Contrecoeur fraud trial or declare a mistrial added to the start of closing arguments in the long-running case on Wednesday.
The last-minute motion was filed two years after the trial of Frank Zampino, the former No. 2 politician at Montreal city hall, and five co-accused began before a judge alone and just as the defence and the prosecution were to begin the first of three days of final arguments.
The motion was filed by Zampino’s lawyer, Isabel Schurman, on the grounds that evidence that the prosecution recently filed in a separate municipal corruption case in which Zampino was arrested and charged in 2017 was relevant to the Contrecoeur trial but withheld from the defence by the prosecution.
The evidence would have been used by Zampino’s defence team to cross-examine certain witnesses and search for other evidence, Schurman told the court.
Court of Quebec Judge Yvan Poulin immediately ruled against a prosecution request to reject the defence motion out of hand on the grounds that it had no chance of succeeding. The matter is serious and warrants a hearing on the merits, he said.
However, Poulin ruled that the prosecution and defence must present their arguments for or against the motion to stay the proceedings or declare a mistrial at the same time as they make their final arguments during the same three days.
In other words, the judge did not delay the start of final arguments or tack on additional dates.
The new evidence, which the Zampino motion says the prosecution has had since November 2016, includes phone records showing that key Crown witness Michel Lalonde, a former engineering firm executive who testified about a meeting with Zampino that the latter denies he attended, had numerous calls or text messages during the time he told the court he was meeting with Zampino to discuss the Contrecoeur land deal.
Lalonde testified at the Contrecoeur trial in April 2017.
Among other things, he placed Zampino at a cocktail fundraiser and at a meeting where the sale of the city-owned land known as Faubourg Contrecoeur to Construction Frank Catania et Associés Inc. was discussed before the company won a call for bids to buy and develop the land.
Zampino, who testified in his defence at the trial, denied he was at any meeting concerning the sale of the land before the board of the city’s real-estate arm, the Société d’habitation et de développement de Montréal, approved the choice of Construction Frank Catania et Associés as the winning bidder in 2007.
The evidence also includes detailed electronic entries of his meetings, even though Lalonde testified at the Contrecoeur trial that he destroyed all of his agendas for the period that the defence wanted to question him about.
Zampino’s defence dedicates a large part of its written final arguments to attacking Lalonde’s credibility as a witness.
In her final arguments in court on Wednesday, Schurman repeated that Zampino didn’t attend any meetings before the choice of the winning bidder was made.
Prosecutor Nicole Martineau told Poulin on Wednesday the Crown will argue that the evidence concerning Lalonde’s records came from the federal Competition Bureau and was part of a separate investigation.
She also said that extracts of the records were disclosed to the defence starting before the trial.
Moreover, the prosecution will argue that lawyers for some of the defendants in the Contrecoeur case were aware of the existence of the Competition Bureau’s evidence concerning Lalonde’s records, Martineau said.
It was a lack of diligence on the part of the defence that it didn’t request the records, she said.
The closing arguments and arguments on the Zampino motion are to continue on Friday.