$22.5 million
From SNC-Lavalin wasn’t a bribe, it was payment for work, Porter says.
Alleged hospital swindler Arthur Porter has confirmed in a new interview that he was paid $22.5 million by SNC-Lavalin, but he denies that the payment was a bribe to guarantee that the engineering firm would win a $1.3-billion contract to build the superhospital of the McGill University Health Centre that he once headed.
In a sometimes sympathetic CBC interview, Porter goes into more detail about his dealings with SNC-Lavalin than in his memoir, The Man Behind The Bow Tie, published last week. In that book, Porter acknowledges that he began negotiating with SNC-Lavalin in 2005 for an international consulting contract while he was CEO of the MUHC and three years before the bidding process for the superhospital contract was launched.
But Porter does not reveal in that book how much he was paid by the Quebecbased conglomerate. Asked in the television interview why SNC-Lavalin paid $22.5 million to one of Porter’s companies, Sierra Asset Management, he replied that it was “for other things, nothing to do with this” — the superhospital contract.
Pressed to provide details, Porter said the payment was for a “contract we had discussed for a long time: one was for Algeria and some things to do in Libya.”
In a partially unsealed police affidavit obtained by The Gazette, investigators allude to a “fictitious” contract for a gas plant in Algeria, but there is no mention of any projects in Libya.
“The hospital contract was never, never breached by me,” added Porter, who has been incarcerated in a Panamanian jail for nearly 16 months as he fights extradition to Canada to face criminal charges over the superhospital contract.
In a separate interview with the CBC aired on Sept. 3, Porter’s wife, Pamela — who is also charged in the alleged kickback scam — provided a radically different account of the SNC-Lavalin payments to her husband.
Pamela Porter said that she knew her husband earned money “to be helping his wartorn home country (Sierra Leone) with consulting for the company” — an apparent allusion to SNC-Lavalin. And of the $22.5 million that Porter and the other defendants are alleged to have taken in bribes, she said: “That wasn’t the amount of money that Arthur told me about. I learned about that amount of money through the media and through the prosecution in court.”
In an email to The Gazette, a spokesperson for SNC-Lavalin denied Porter’s assertions about a consulting contract for the engineering firm.
“We have no record providing substantiation to Mr. Porter’s allegation,” Elaine Arsenault said.
She also refused to comment on a $1.6-million lawsuit that a former SNC-Lavalin executive, André Dufour, has filed against the company.
Dufour has not been accused of any crime in the alleged superhospital fraud. Until July, Dufour had served on behalf of SNC-Lavalin as president of Groupe immobilier santé McGill, the private consortium that’s building the superhospital.
“Regarding the lawsuit that André Dufour has filed against SNC-Lavalin, we are unfortunately not able to comment due to the ongoing judicial process,” Arsenault added.