Porter declared officially dead by judge
Two years after his demise in Panama, accused hospital fraudster Arthur Porter has been declared officially dead by a Quebec Court judge, ending a tedious exchange with Panamanian authorities for documented proof of death.
Crown prosecutors submitted in court on Friday morning Porter’s death certificate from Panama, along with an affidavit confirming the identity of the deceased. Judge Yves Paradis then issued the declaration of Porter’s death from the bench.
“The criminal charges (against Porter) have not been withdrawn, the accused is not acquitted,” Jean Pascal Boucher, of the director of criminal and penal prosecutions, told the Montreal Gazette. “(But) the file is closed because the accused is dead.”
Porter, the former head of the McGill University Health Centre, died in Panama on June 30, 2015, after a lingering illness with lung cancer. The 59-year-old radiation oncologist was accused of taking $22.5 million in bribes for the $1.3-billion MUHC superhospital construction contract.
Porter was arrested by Interpol agents in Panama on May 27, 2013, and he fought extradition to Quebec while incarcerated in La Joya prison.
The court proceedings against the other co-accused in the alleged MUHC conspiracy is continuing, Boucher added. Those defendants are Yanaï Elbaz, who was responsible for real estate redevelopment at the hospital network; his brother, lawyer Yohann Elbaz; Pierre Duhaime, the ex-CEO of SNC-Lavalin; Riadh Ben Aïssa, a former vice-president of SNC-Lavalin’s international construction division; and Stéphane Roy, who once served as financial controller of the Quebec engineering conglomerate.
A pre-trial conference is set for Sept. 27, and it will be under a publication ban, Boucher noted. Although the preliminary inquiries for all the accused have ended, no date has been set for a trial.
It’s expected that the defence for some of the accused will invoke the Jordan ruling by the Supreme Court last year — which set strict limits on the wait times for criminal trials — to have the charges stayed against them. But legal experts have questioned whether the case will be thrown out of court, given that some of the delays have been caused by defence motions.
Although provincial police investigators who flew to Panama two years ago said they positively identified Porter’s body in a morgue, Quebec authorities received the official death certificate this week.
“Since this involves Panama, it’s much more complicated,” Crown prosecutor Nathalie Kleber explained in an interview in June.
The lack of a death certificate fuelled speculation that Porter might still be alive and that he had faked his illness to evade the law. Porter’s own family sought to quell the conspiracy theories, insisting that he was truly ill with non-small cell lung cancer, and they released his medical records as proof.