Tremblay defends reputation in 2015 letter
Eleven days after Quebec’s anticorruption squad carried out search warrants at his home and cottage in 2015, ex-Montreal mayor Gérald Tremblay penned a four-page letter attempting to clear himself from any hint of corruption by giving his version of events.
Tremblay, the Montreal Gazette reported this week, called his thenassistant in tears on Aug. 9, 2015, to ask if he could give her the letter.
“Will you do something for me?” Tremblay said in the call. “I would just leave you a, a document. Because I don’t know what will happen to me.”
The phone call was intercepted by UPAC as part of a wiretap operation carried out during its ongoing investigation into allegations of corruption in Montreal while Tremblay ’s Union Montreal party was in power at city hall.
The conversation was transcribed in an affidavit to obtain a warrant to search the former assistant’s home in 2016 and detailed in newly released search warrants obtained by the Montreal Gazette.
On Friday, Tremblay’s former assistant sent the document mentioned in the call to several media outlets.
In it, the former mayor describes how UPAC simultaneously carried out search warrants at his Outremont home and cottage in late July 2015. He then criticizes the investigation and repeatedly defends his integrity.
Tremblay wrote investigators told him they were looking for his bank accounts, safe, passport, agendas and property records. They were also searching for any documents related to illegal financing at Union Montreal. In the end, he says, all they seized was his iPad and a few documents.
“What I find most disturbing and unfair is that I am being asked for confidentiality so as not to interfere with ongoing investigations,” he wrote, “and that whenever they want, they orchestrate leaks in the media that contribute to undermining people’s credibility and cause prejudices and irreversible collateral damage.”
Tremblay noted he always offered to collaborate with investigators and the Charbonneau Commission, which he also criticized.
Tremblay, who resigned as mayor in 2012, and his former assistant are not charged in any criminal matter.
The police executed 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 and collusion related to Montreal’s hosting of the FINA Aquatics Championships in 2005.
Tremblay touches on both in the document he prepared, detailing how he personally sought out sponsorships to prevent the city from losing the championships and decided Montreal would cover any deficit from the event.
“I am the mayor of Montreal, an Olympic city, and I care about its success,” Tremblay wrote.
“What is damaging and unfounded,” he added, “is to make a connection between these sponsorships and assume that in return for a legal contribution, which was accounted for and public, there was any wrongdoing or promises made to anyone.”
Tremblay wrote that throughout his 25-year political career, both in Quebec and Montreal, he must have done hundreds of successful financing campaigns.
“But to think that someone could have influenced my decisions and received a contract for their contributions is unfounded and (it is) quite sincerely regrettable that some people think that way,” he wrote.
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.