Witnesses to finally testify in CRA fraud trial
Five charged in tax evasion scheme, including revenue agency auditors
A judge is expected to begin hearing evidence from witnesses today in a case in which construction magnate Antonio (Tony) Accurso is alleged to have bribed two Canada Revenue Agency auditors so he could avoid paying taxes on revenue generated by the empire he created.
Accurso, 69, and the two CRA employees — Antonio Girardi, 56, and Adriano Furgiuele, 52 — as well as two other men face five charges each: fraud, forgery, breach of trust of a public official, conspiracy to commit fraud, conspiracy to commit perjury and conspiracy to commit breach of trust.
The trial began Jan. 4 with Quebec Court Judge Mélanie Hébert hearing a series of motions. This week, eight investigators from the RCMP and CRA are expected to be the first of more than 70 witnesses called to testify by the Crown.
The trial is expected to stretch into June.
The accused were first charged in 2012 in Project Coche, an investigation led by the RCMP into allegations of widespread corruption at the CRA'S offices in downtown Montreal. The seeds of Project Coche germinated in 2006 as Project Colisée, a lengthy investigation into the leader of the Rizzuto organization and dozens of its associates, was nearing its end.
In March 2006, Jean-pierre Paquette, a CRA agent seconded to Project Colisée, received an anonymous tip alleging that someone in management at CRA was corrupt.
According to a few court decisions that have emerged from Project Coche-related cases, a few of the more than one million conversations secretly recorded during Project Colisée supported the tipster's claim. Paquette was told that Laval businessman Francesco Bruno, now 59, and his accountant Francesco Fiorino, 61 — the other two men charged in the current case — were involved in tax evasion and could count on the help of a “big boss” at CRA who had the final say on investigations.
When Paquette looked into Bruno's CRA file he noticed an auditor named Nicola Iammarrone had been assigned to it for three years. Paquette asked I am maronne if he had received any outside pressure on Bruno's file and the auditor claimed there was none.
At least two previous court decisions describe how Paquette's CRA superior in Project Colisée told him to do nothing with the tip and the wiretaps. But Paquette ignored this and decided to store the information in a computer file labelled “corruption.”
When a new CRA leader was assigned to the Colisée investigation several months later, he was informed of allegations involving CRA employees. Paquette's new boss asked him what he knew, and this set in motion an audit of Bruno's companies that became Project Coche.
The case currently before Judge Hébert is just one of many that came out of the investigation. Four CRA employees, including Iammarrone, who accepted $100,000 in bribes from an Île Bizard businessman, were convicted in other cases and two were acquitted.
In the case at hand, Accurso and Bruno are alleged to have used a shell corporation, 3703436 Canada Inc., to participate in a tax evasion scheme.
In 2018, the RCMP issued a release alleging Accurso paid used the shell corporation to pay Girardi and Furgiuele $740,000 and Bruno more than $1.9 million. The RCMP also alleged that a “plan of action” was established to sidestep a CRA audit of 3703436 Canada Inc.
■ Antonio (Tony) Accurso: In a previous criminal trial, Accurso described how he took over a small construction company that his father started, Louisbourg Construction, and turned it into a collection of companies that generated more than $1 billion in revenue in 2009, the peak for his empire.
That trial involved municipal corruption in Laval, where city officials set up a fixed tender process through which construction and engineering firms paid bribes to be awarded contracts.
In June 2018, a jury found Accurso guilty of being part of a conspiracy to commit municipal corruption, bribing city officials and breach of trust. He is appealing the jury's verdict and the four-year prison term he received.
Since 2010, Accurso and companies he owned have been fined more than $8 million in tax evasion cases that sprung from Project Coche.
■ Francesco Bruno: In 2011, Bruno and his company B.T. Céramiques pleaded guilty to tax evasion charges at the Montreal courthouse and they were fined $1.4 million and $130,009 respectively. In that case, Bruno admitted that, between 2004 and 2008, he contravened the Income Tax Act by using false billing to make it appear his company as well as two construction firms owned at the time by Accurso — Simard Beaudry Construction Inc. and Louisbourg Ltd. — had lower incomes.
Bruno is not required to be in the courtroom and is allowed to follow the trial from home to avoid contracting COVID -19.
He is diabetic and his lawyer argued that if he followed the trial in person he would be putting his life in danger.
■ Francesco Fiorino: In 2008, Fiorino was Bruno's accountant. The current trial is often referred to as the “plan of action” case in court because of a document found in Fiorino's office in Montreal.
In 2019, Fiorino made an unsuccessful effort to have the “plan of action” document excluded as evidence in the current case. But he did succeed in having a statement he gave to the RCMP, when he was arrested on Aug. 9, 2012, excluded as evidence.
While Fiorino was interrogated an investigator hinted that he was likely going to be arrested again in a different case, in front of his children as had happened earlier that day, and that he'd be doing himself a favour if he talked. A Quebec Court judge ruled that whatever Fiorino told the RCMP was not given freely and voluntarily.
■ Adriano Furgiuele: The former CRA auditor is Bruno's cousin and, according to several court decisions made in Project Coche-related cases, Furgiuele is alleged to have authored the “plan of action.” He was a team leader of CRA auditors and was in charge of what information could go inside the agency's file on 3703436 Canada Inc.
■ Antonio Girardi: Girardi worked for the Canada Revenue Agency for more than a decade before he was fired, in December 2010 while the RCMP conducted its investigation. CRA was informed Girardi had moonlighted at Groupe Conseil Delvex, a company that advised clients on how to obtain tax credits from the federal government.
In 2009, Girardi and Furgiuele were questioned, in Switzerland, about Swiss bank accounts they held in Geneva. Swiss authorities suspected the accounts were being used to launder money.
Nothing came out of the money laundering investigation but the statements both men gave were recently ruled as admissible in the trial before Hébert.