Revenue Quebec takes possession of Porter’s condo in Mount Royal
More than two years after the death of accused hospital fraudster Arthur Porter, Revenue Quebec this month seized a town of Mount Royal condominium that he had purchased in 2012, the Montreal Gazette has learned.
Revenue Quebec, acting as a liquidator for Porter’s estate, took possession on Oct. 20 of the property in the Elofts complex at 2375 Ekers Ave., according to provincial property records.
Porter, the former head of the McGill University Health Centre, died of lung cancer in Panama on June 30, 2015, while contesting extradition to Quebec on a raft of corruption charges arising from the MUHC superhospital construction contract. Although two provincial police investigators who flew to Panama confirmed Porter’s death by examining his body in a morgue, it took Panamanian authorities more than two years to provide Quebec with a formal death certificate.
A Quebec Court judge declared Porter’s death official in August, paving the way for Revenue Quebec to seize the property, which was shrouded in mystery since Porter purchased it through his former executive assistant.
The time and circumstances of the transaction were highly unusual. A month after Porter resigned from the MUHC under mounting pressure from the board of directors, he purchased the condo for $288,730 in cash.
Property records show that he was not present for the signing of the property deed. Rather, Porter’s former executive assistant at the MUHC, Lynn Panneton, purchased the condo on his behalf. Despite the fact that Porter was no longer employed by the MUHC, a lawyer who was also working for the hospital network acted as Panneton’s attorney in the matter.
On April 2, 2012, Panneton acted again on Porter’s behalf when he sold a penthouse condo on de Maisonneuve Blvd. for $450,000. That sale was unusual, too, because Porter took a $96,000 loss on that condo, a property he had purchased nearly eight years earlier.
Panneton did not work for the MUHC at the time of both the T.M.R. and de Maisonneuve property transactions.
Current phone records list Panneton as living in the condo in T.M.R. Panneton did not respond on Friday to phone messages left on her residential land line and through Facebook Messenger. On her Facebook page, Panneton lists as friends Pamela Mattock Porter, Porter’s wife, who pleaded guilty in December 2014 to two counts of money-laundering in the alleged MUHC conspiracy.
Arthur Porter, who at one point was also head of Canada’s surveillance-services watchdog, was accused of rigging the bids to award the $1.3-billion superhospital construction contract to a private consortium headed by SNC-Lavalin. Prosecutors allege that Porter and his co-conspirators received $22.5 million in payments from SNC-Lavalin, which the engineering firm later stated were not authorized by the company.
To date, Quebec authorities say they have frozen $17.5 million in assets belonging to Porter and others. That still leaves $5 million that’s missing. A review of court documents by the Gazette suggests that $4 million of that sum was likely transferred to Panama, the country where Porter and his wife were arrested by Interpol agents in May 2013.
Officials with Revenue Quebec were not immediately available for comment on Friday.