Corriveau to be jailed four years, fined $1.4M
‘Spark plug’ in federal sponsorship scam
• Jacques Corriveau, one of the key players in the federal sponsorship scandal, was sentenced Wednesday to a four- year prison term for using his influence in Ottawa to help set up a sophisticated crime.
Corriveau was also ordered to pay a $ 1.4- million fine, but even prosecutor Jacques Dagenais had difficulty containing a chuckle when reporters asked if Corriveau will ever have to pay it. After his sentence expires, Corriveau will have a delay of five years before he starts paying it. If he hasn’t paid the fine in full after 10 years, he risks another 10-year prison term. But, by then, Corriveau would be at least 97 years old.
Hours after he was sentenced by Superior Court Justice Jean- Francois Buffoni, a Quebec Court of Appeal justice freed Corriveau pending appeal. He was ordered to surrender his passport, to remain in Canada and to keep the peace.
Earlier, Buffoni said significant factors in his sentencing decision included the longevity of the scam that saw money stolen from the poorly managed federal sponsorship program and the sophistication of the scheme.
The scheme ran f rom 1997 to 2003 before an audit revealed more than $ 100 million of the $ 250 million in taxpayers’ money spent by the Liberal government led by then prime minister Jean Chrétien, Corriveau’s longtime friend, had gone to advertising and communication firms that supported the Liberals.
In 2005, t he Gomery Commission revealed that Corriveau was aware of the program before it was announced publicly and that he appeared to have help set up the structure through which money was paid out. In 2013, criminal charges were filed and, on Nov. 1, a jury found Corriveau, 83, guilty of influence- peddling to defraud the government, producing fake documents and laundering the proceeds of crime.
During the trial, it was estimated that Corriveau and his design company, Pluridesign Canada Inc., made more than $ 6 million from the scheme.
Last week, Corriveau and the Crown reached an agreement through which the government will confiscate more than $800,000 from an investment account. Roughly half the value of his home in St- Bruno, Que., currently estimated to be worth more than $ 980,000, will be confiscated whenever it is sold.
Prosecutors had s uggested Corriveau serve between three and five years behind bars, while the defence was seeking a sentence in the community, citing his age and the lengthy delay in his case getting to trial.
Dagenais said he was satisfied with the prison term.
"(In the past) courts would have a much softer view of financial crimes where there was no physical harm.
“As prosecutors, we were quite scandalized by that because you could have (a case) involving more than $ 1 million in fraud with quite low sentences,” Dagenais said. “Now the trend is different. It has picked up in quite a different way in the past 10 years.”
"( Corriveau) acted as a spark plug ( in the scheme) because he had the influence. He was among the first to be aware of the ( sponsorship) program, to be aware that there was a lot of money that wasn’t managed in the standard way by the government.”
While delivering the sentence, Buffoni said Corriveau’s age and his “less than perfect health” should not be factors in determining a punishment.
He noted that Corriveau was 63 when he started to take advantage of the sponsorship program, which was intended to make the federal government more visible in Quebec, in particular after the province nearly voted in favour of separation during the 1995 referendum.
“It’s a tough sentence — a very tough sentence,” Corriveau’s lawyer, Gerald Soulière told reporters outside the courtroom.
While a jury convicted Corriveau on three charges in all, Soulière said that, in his opinion, “he was really only convicted on influencepeddling and the maximum sentence for that is five years. So four years is tough.”
Soulière is planning an appeal of the sentence. He is already appealing the conviction.
“Mr. Corriveau never thought he would end his days in prison, that he would go to prison,” Souliere told reporters. “So, other than to say he’s stunned, there’s nothing else I can say.”