Ex-mayor Tremblay’s phone was wiretapped: warrants
Newly released police documents shed light on UPAC investigations
The police were listening in when ex-Montreal mayor Gérald Tremblay cried on the phone to his former assistant in 2015 and asked to leave a document with her because he didn’t know what would happen to him.
The intercepted call, part of a wiretap operation carried out in the Quebec anti-corruption squad’s ongoing investigation into allegations of corruption in Montreal during the time that Tremblay’s Union Montreal party was in power at city hall, is detailed in one of 38 newly released search warrants obtained by the Montreal Gazette.
Tremblay, who resigned as mayor in 2012, and his former assistant are not charged in any criminal matter.
“Uh, Marie-Andrée?” Tremblay says in the Aug. 9, 2015 call that UPAC investigators transcribed in an affidavit to obtain a warrant to search the former assistant’s home in 2016.
“Will you do something for me?” Tremblay asks in the call on a Sunday morning, 11 days after UPAC investigators had searched his Outremont home and his country house.
“Of course,” his former assistant answers.
“I would just leave you a, a document. Because I don’t know what will happen to me.”
Fifteen seconds of silence follow, the affidavit says, as muffled sobs are heard from Tremblay.
“I don’t know what to tell you,” his former assistant says as Tremblay cries.
They then agree that he’ll bring the document to her home. He thanks her before hanging up.
The Montreal Gazette went to court seeking the release of the affidavits in 2017. Lawyers for former city executive committee chairman Frank Zampino contested the newspaper’s motion. However, a judge sided with the newspaper and ordered their release. A publication ban on the contents was lifted this week.
The police executed the 38 search warrants at different places as part of an investigation dubbed “Projet Fronde.”
The operation began in 2009 as a probe of Montreal’s cancelled $356-million water-management contract and later broadened into an investigation of political financing using a system of phoney billing, allocation of municipal contracts and use of an existing system of collusion to obtain financing for the city to stage the FINA Aquatics Championships in 2005.
UPAC has executed dozens of other search warrants in the investigation, including a series of raids of homes and offices carried out in the summer of 2015.
The investigation led to the arrests in September 2017 of Zampino, who quit politics in 2008, Bernard Trépanier, the former chief fundraiser of Union Montreal, former municipal civil servant Robert Marcil and five former heads or employees of engineering consulting firms that had contracts with the city. The police allege there was a system of awarding municipal contracts among a network of firms in exchange for kickbacks.
The 38 warrants have been turned over to the defence as part of the Crown’s disclosure of evidence.
One of the accused, engineer Yves Théberge, a former vice-president of CIMA+, pleaded guilty to conspiracy and municipal corruption in January.
There have been no arrests in connection with the water-management contract or the FINA event, and the allegations in the affidavits have not been tested in court.
Besides the warrant to search the home of Tremblay’s former assistant, the police used the affidavits between 2010 and 2016 to obtain warrants to conduct physical surveillance of some of the accused, obtain evidence previously seized by Revenue Quebec, search firms’ offices and obtain the cellphone number of Trépanier by searching his file at a hospital where he was undergoing treatment.
The police also used an affidavit in 2016 to search the office of a ventilation company that appears from emails written in 2007 and previously seized at the offices of Construction Frank Catania et Associés Inc. to have worked on a wine cellar in Zampino’s house.
The subject heading one of the messages, sent from an assistant’s email address to the email address of firm president Paolo Catania, reads: Questions — Travaux Cave à vin résidence Z. (“Work wine cellar residence Z.”) — and says, in English, the ventilation company is ready to “start working on the project.” It adds: “they want to know when they can go ahead. Should I call Mr. Z wife or assistant? (I don’t know how delicate the topic is)”.
The next message, sent from Catania’s email address to his assistant’s email address, says: “Call his wife.”
The affidavit says a wine cellar “of professional construction” was seen in Zampino’s house during a police search in 2014.
Zampino and Catania are among the accused in the Contrecoeur fraud case. The judge is to render a verdict on May 2.
The list of criminal acts being investigated by UPAC grew in 2015, the affidavits indicate. That year, forgery and proceeds of crime were added to breach of trust, fraud, municipal corruption and conspiracy.
The police state in the 2016 affidavit to search the home of Tremblay’s former assistant that “the present investigation is not completed and other judicial authorizations are to be foreseen.”
The police also state they have reason to believe that Tremblay “knew the existence of this system.”
Documents relating to Tremblay were seized in the search, the investigators say in a subsequent report to the justice of the peace who authorized the search.
The material, it says, included: “emails, journalists’ contact information, text of the commission of inquiry, visit to 357C, agenda.”
Other material was put on a USB key, which the police report describes as: “copy of computer inventory file concerning Gérald Tremblay that was found on the tablet” of his former assistant.