Accurso guilty of corrupting Laval city hall
Charges included conspiracy, fraud, bribery, breach of trust
Former construction entrepreneur Antonio Accurso was found guilty by a jury on Monday of all five charges against him in a Laval fraud and corruption trial.
The verdict came on the seventh day of the jury’s deliberations. The charges were:
That Accurso, now 66, was ■ between 1996 and 2010 part of a conspiracy with more than 60 people, including disgraced former Laval mayor Gilles Vaillancourt, “to commit acts of corruption in municipal affairs” and breach of trust.
That he conspired with 56 ■ people, including Vaillancourt and then Laval director-general Claude Asselin, to commit fraud.
That he defrauded the city of ■
Laval.
That he bribed Laval city officials. ■
That he helped Vaillancourt, ■
Asselin and Claude Deguise, who was Laval’s head of engineering from 1997 until he resigned in 2008, to commit a breach of trust.
At the start of the trial in May, prosecutor Richard Rougeau told the jury he intended to show them that Accurso had been part of a “well-honed” system of bribery and collusion.
Between 1996 and 2010, the majority of construction contracts issued by the city of Laval were rigged — awarded before they were put to tender. About 20 construction companies colluded in the scheme, which was masterminded by Vaillancourt. He gave orders to Asselin, who in turn issued orders to Deguise.
Vaillancourt conceded in his guilty plea on Dec. 1, 2016, that he had managed the system. He would decide which contracts would be awarded to colluding companies; in exchange, the companies would kick back two per cent of the value of the contracts to him. He counted on an old friend, Marc Gendron, an executive with the Laval engineering firm Tecsult, to collect the kickbacks. Another Tecsult executive, Roger Desbois, replaced Gendron. Both testified as witnesses for the prosecution in Accurso’s trial.
Accurso was one of 37 people charged in 2013 in the UPAC investigation Project Honorer, the case that saw Vaillancourt sentenced in 2016 to a six-year prison term. UPAC is the Quebec government agency working to fight corruption, collusion and other economic crimes involving government procurement. Twentyeight of the 37 pleaded guilty to at least one of the charges. Some received prison sentences. Six of the accused, including Guy Vaillancourt, brother of the former mayor, had their charges dropped and three died. Accurso was the last person with an outstanding case in Project Honorer. An affidavit used in a request to search the former mayor’s home during the investigation described Guy Vaillancourt as having been used as a “drop point” for cash gathered in the scheme.
The same affidavit revealed that Project Honorer began after a Nov. 16, 2010 newspaper article alleging that Vaillancourt had given envelopes of cash to Laval-based MNAs to support them in upcoming elections. After interviews with several politicians in which they learned of Vaillancourt’s collusion system, investigators changed their focus.
On April 8, 2011, Gilles Théberge, a construction company executive who would testify for the prosecution in Accurso’s trial, outlined for UPAC investigators how the system worked. He told them that because too many representatives of companies involved in the scheme were turning up at city hall, it was decided that Gendron would collect the kickback money quietly.
Théberge said subsequently that some of the colluding companies donated money to charitable causes, including one to “save the Cosmodome” — and that they were able to recoup the money by charging “extras” for work never done on contracts they were given.
Vaillancourt pleaded guilty to conspiracy, fraud and breach of trust and agreed to return $8.6 million to the city of Laval — including $7 million he had placed in Swiss bank accounts. As part of the plea agreement, he conceded that it was “impossible to count with precision the illicit gains” he had accumulated over the years. In a lawsuit, the city of Laval estimated it was more than $12 million. Vaillancourt was granted day parole last November.
Asselin pleaded guilty on Oct. 3, 2017, to fraud and having conspired to commit a breach of trust. He admitted that he knew the system of collusion had been in place from 1996 to 2006. He was sentenced to a prison term of two years less a day and granted a release in February.
Asselin told his parole officer that he had kept silent about what was happening because he didn’t want to lose his job, according to a summary of the Quebec parole board’s decision. He also claimed that he was not paid and received no benefit for his role in the system. The jury was told otherwise during Accurso’s trial: They were told that a company involved in the collusion scheme did $100,000 worth of work on Asselin’s home and that he was billed about onethird of that amount.
Accurso also testified that he paid an interior designer to work on Asselin’s home and billed him through one of his companies. He said he hired the designer as a favour to Asselin, whom he described as a longtime friend.
Deguise, Laval’s former head of engineering, admitted in his guilty plea that he took orders from Asselin about which company would be awarded contracts. When a contract was issued to a colluding company, a representative of that company received a list of the colluding companies that “lost” and it was up to the “winner” to arrange fake bids with those companies.
Théberge told UPAC investigators that Deguise was often called in to resolve conflicts — if, for instance, the owner of a company involved in the collusion scheme felt there was more work in a project than was outlined in a contract. Théberge said Deguise demanded payment for this role and, when asked what he was owed, would flash fingers. It was understood, Théberge said, that each finger equalled $1,000.
In November, Deguise told the Parole Board of Canada that, like Asselin, he had stayed silent in order to keep his job. He said he resigned from his city job after receiving orders to put more pressure on the companies involved to pay up.
Accurso’s cousin Giuseppe (Joe) Molluso was among the 28 people who pleaded guilty in Project Honorer. He pleaded guilty to a conspiracy charge, fraud and municipal corruption. He admitted that he took part in the system of collusion while working for Accurso’s Simard Beaudry Inc. and Louisbourg Construction and that he communicated with representatives from about a dozen companies to co-ordinate fake bids. He also admitted that he paid the two-per-cent kickbacks to Tecsult’s Gendron and Desbois between 1998 and 2009.
On Sept. 20, 2017, Molluso was sentenced to a prison term of two years less a day, which he is serving in the community — the first 12 months of the sentence under house arrest.
A condition of the sentence was that he was not allowed to communicate with others charged in Project Honorer, but he was granted special permission to talk to Accurso if it was for “his legitimate and paid work for the company Simard-Beaudry.” When he testified in his own defence, Accurso said that Molluso was “like a brother” to him and that he still worked as a consultant on construction projects.