Computer consultant to face new trial in fraud case

Judge made several errors during delivery of jury instructions, Court of Appeal rules

The Quebec Court of Appeals has ordered a new trial for a computer consultant who was acquitted in a fraud case where the city of Montreal was bilked out of almost $5 million by one of its former civil servants. On Dec. 5, 2015, a Quebec Superior Court jury found Benoît Bissonnette not guilty of breach of trust and conspiracy after four days of deliberations at the Montreal courthouse. Bissonnette had been arrested by Sûreté du Québec investigators in 2009, along with Gilles Parent, the ex-director of information technology for the city of Montreal. In 2012, Parent pleaded guilty to fraud and breach of trust, and was sentenced to six years in jail. Crown prosecutors appealed the Bissonnette verdict, arguing that the Superior Court judge at the time, Jean-François Buffoni, erred in his instructions to the jury. On Tuesday, the Court of Appeal ruled that the judge did make several errors, including relying on an outdated edition of Watt’s Manual of Criminal Jury Instructions on the issue of “mens rea” — that is, the intention or knowledge of wrongdoing that constitutes part of a crime. During the first trial, prosecutors had alleged that Bissonnette assisted Parent in a fake-billing scheme. Parent had previously admitted to creating a company under a false name and using a system of pre-billing to swindle the city out of $4.8 million from December 2006 to September 2008. The money was then deposited into bank accounts in Hong Kong. In a Parole Board of Canada decision in 2015, Parent was quoted as saying he committed the fraud because he “felt like his work wasn’t being valued and estimated that what he had accomplished was worth much more than what (he) was earning.”