Accurso seeks release during appeal
Construction entrepreneur Antonio Accurso has filed a request to be released from a penitentiary while he appeals his conviction and the sentence he received Thursday for his role in Laval’s municipal corruption.
Accurso, 66, received a four-year prison term for taking part in the system of collusion created by former Laval mayor Gilles Vaillancourt through which contracts were awarded, between 1996 and 2010, to dozens of companies before they were put to tender. Accurso’s lawyer, Marc Labelle, said he expects to argue for Accurso’s release before the Quebec Court of Appeal in Montreal Tuesday.
Accurso states he wants to be free while he deals with his other legal woes, including two impaired driving-related cases he faces at the municipal courthouse in Deux-Montagnes, the city where he resides.
In one case, that dates back to 2011, he is accused of driving while impaired. The other case, filed last year, alleges Accurso refused to submit to a breathalyzer test after being pulled over just before midnight on May 15, 2017.
He also faces five provincial income tax-related cases filed against him in 2013 at the Laval courthouse. During sentencing arguments in the Laval municipal corruption case last week, Accurso’s lawyer said, depending on the outcome, those five cases could leave his client bankrupt.
Labelle’s claim likely came as a surprise to anyone who heard an accountant who worked for Accurso testify about how the businessman increased his companies’ revenues from $265 million in 2003 to more than $1 billion in 2009. The accountant’s testimony was part of Accurso’s defence — that he was too busy turning his companies into a billion-dollar international business to notice two of his firms were participating in the collusion scheme.
Accurso said the Laval city contracts his companies were awarded between 2003 and 2009 represented no more than three per cent of the combined revenues of his businesses.
Labelle said last week that most of Accurso’s companies are now controlled by his children. As part of the request seeking his release, Accurso says he wants to support his children while they run the companies.
In another pending criminal case, Accurso faces fraud and breach of trust charges filed against him and three other men in 2012 as part of Project Coche, an RCMP investigation into alleged corruption at Montreal offices of the Canada Revenue Agency. That case returns to the Montreal courthouse July 12. Accurso has pleaded not guilty to all six charges he faces.
On June 25, a jury found Accurso guilty of all five charges filed against him in the Laval municipal corruption case. Labelle has based his appeal of the conviction, in part, on his argument that the charges should have been placed under a stay of proceedings before the trial began in May.
Accurso’s first trial on the same charges ended in a mistrial last year after Superior Court Justice James Brunton determined the jury was tainted because at least one juror, and possibly two others, heard gossip about a prosecution witness as the first trial neared its end.