Buyers keeping the Touch at arm’s length
Asking price for Accurso’s yacht cut by $3 million
Four bedrooms, a private dining room, an on-board hot tub, a range of 2,000 nautical miles … and a whole lot of baggage.
That’s what any prospective buyer would be getting if they decided to shell out a little under $5 million US to become the proud new owner of Quebec’s most infamous luxury yacht, the Touch. After more than three years on the market, it seems the ship’s past as a floating playground for the province’s top union brass, municipal politicians and construction heavyweights may be seriously hindering its owner’s efforts to be rid of it once and for all.
As of Friday, it was still up for sale — for nearly $3 million less than the original asking price of $7.9 million.
Construction magnate Tony Accurso, who commissioned the Touch in the mid1990s and christened it in 2004, wined and dined some of Quebec’s most powerful men and their families on board the 131-tonne, 120-foot vessel. His guests included former FTQ president Michel Arsenault, former Montreal executive chairman Frank Zampino and former FTQConstruction boss Jean Lavallée, among others.
Accurso allegedly covered the cost of many, if not all, of those vacations. The Touch is normally rented out for $65,000 a week, and thus gen- erates income for the construction boss when he is not using it. According to Superyachts.com, a U.K.-based website that tracks developments in the luxury yacht industry, the vessel was “a labour of love” and is unique.
“Accurso took it on himself to create his ideal vessel having searched and found nothing that met his requirements on the market,” a profile of the Touch on the site reads. “The superyacht took 10 years to construct starting in 1994 with a basic hull from an aging boat Accurso bought at a Florida auction and transported to Montreal. French-Canadian yacht builder Michel Dufrense was hired to manage the build, along with a team of welders, electricians, plumbers and craftsmen who specialized in building construction, not yachts.”
In fact, almost $1.7 million in work done on the Touch was expensed illegally to Accurso’s construction companies, landing them in hot water. The companies pleaded guilty in 2010 to evading taxes through the use of ineligible business expenses and were fined $4.1 million.
When Accurso’s sunsoaked getaways in the company of big names like Zampino and Arsenault began making headlines in 2009, the Touch quickly became a symbol of corruption and excess in Quebec’s construction industry — a dubious reputation that was only reinforced by Quebec’s political commentators and editorial cartoonists. For many public figures, being caught on the boat became something akin to a kiss of death.
By 2013, the Touch seemed to have faded somewhat from public memory — replaced by grainy images of Mobsters stuffing their socks with wads of cash and footage of mayors being dragged out of their homes in handcuffs at the break of dawn. In recent weeks, however, the ship that sunk a thousand men has returned with a vengeance.
Using its powers to subpoena witnesses and seize evidence, the Charbonneau Commission got its hands on private images of Accurso and his guests enjoying themselves on board. Those pictures, featuring people partying and relaxing in various states of undress, have now been splashed across newspaper front pages and television screens all over Que- bec, shattering the privacy once enjoyed by the Touch’s powerful passengers and dragging the ship itself back into the media spotlight.
Last Wednesday a wiretap tape was played that suggested at least one senior union executive believed that the vessel may have been partly financed by the FTQ’s multibillion-dollar Solidarity Fund. Arsenault, who was on the stand for four days, denied that this was the case.
After fielding dozens of questions about his vacations with “Tony,” the former labour federation president finally got fed up and suggested that the commission — and the media, and perhaps everyone else — had become bizarrely fixated on Accurso’s floating palace.
“(It’s) like we don’t have anything else to do in Quebec besides concentrate on Tony Accurso’s boat.”
The Touch is being presented for sale by broker Josh Gulbranson of Fraser Yachts (www.fraseryachts.com).