No jail time for former SNC-Lavalin CEO
Facing more than a dozen charges, Duhaime pleads guilty to one, avoids trial
Former SNC-Lavalin CEO Pierre Duhaime will serve no time behind bars despite his guilty plea in what has been called “the biggest fraud in Canadian history.”
Duhaime, 64, was to go on trial Monday to face charges stemming from the rigged bid to build the McGill University Health Centre superhospital in N.D.G.
He was facing more than a dozen charges related to a $30-million bribe SNC-Lavalin agreed to pay to MUHC executives Arthur Porter and Yanaï Elbaz.
Instead, at the Montreal courthouse on Friday, Duhaime opted to plead guilty to one count of breach of trust.
He admitted that in November 2009, he helped Elbaz commit a breach of trust. That year, Duhaime was named CEO of the engineering firm just before key decisions were made in the bidding process.
In the lead-up to the scheduled trial, Duhaime’s lawyer, Michel Massicotte, was involved in closeddoor meetings with prosecutors and a judge with the goal of resolving the case.
Massicotte revealed he found a credibility problem with a key witness — Gilles Laramée, SNC-Lavalin’s former chief financial officer — after which the prosecution changed its stance.
Once Duhaime entered his plea, the prosecution withdrew 15 other charges.
Quebec Court Judge Dominique Joly agreed with a joint recommendation by Massicotte and the Crown for a 20-month sentence to be served in the community.
Duhaime, who lives on Lakeshore Drive in Dorval, must serve six months of house arrest then adhere to a curfew for the following seven months.
He will then be required to follow a series of conditions for the remaining seven months.
Duhaime agreed to make a $200,000 donation to CAVAC, a provincial organization that supports victims of crime, and he is required to carry out 240 hours of community service over a one-year period beginning Aug. 1.
“I am convinced of one thing — if you take a sample that is representative of the Canadian population and let them take the time to reflect for more than 10 minutes on all of the circumstances, no one will be shocked” by the sentence, assistant-chief prosecutor Robert Rouleau told reporters.
“Is there someone here among you this morning who would want to be in Mr. Duhaime’s shoes?”
When asked why the prosecution backed out of the trial at the last minute, Rouleau said: “It was clear that during the trial (the prosecution) was not able to prove Mr. Duhaime had the knowledge, at the start, that money was given to the heads of the MUHC.”
According to a joint statement of facts agreed upon by both sides, Duhaime made a brief call to Elbaz on Nov. 1, 2009, which he was not allowed to do as the company was involved in the bidding process.
Separately, according to the same statement, between Nov. 1-19, 2009, he was made aware that another SNC-Lavalin employee had communicated with Elbaz, but Duhaime took no action.
Rouleau told reporters Duhaime “was in a position where he had reason to believe that privileged information was being transmitted illegally to put SNC-Lavalin in a preferred position. ... He chose to look the other way. This is what he was sentenced for.”
Rouleau added: “We did not contend ... he had the most important role in this. It was quite to the contrary. He had the least implication in the grand scheme of things.”
As for why Laramée was dropped as a Crown witness, both Rouleau and Massicotte would not go into details.
“The principal witness in this affair is a witness who, in our opinion, was not trustworthy,” Massicotte said. “We made our representations to the prosecution and they had the wisdom to hear us.”
Massicotte said his client lost more than $10 million in retirement benefits and other payments he expected from SNC-Lavalin before his departure following his arrest — the first of two — in 2012.
He said the arrests destroyed Duhaime’s reputation and that he has been unable to find work except as the administrator of a family-owned company.
The contract to build the hospital was worth $1.3 billion. However, including a 20-year maintenance agreement, the overall contract is worth more than $4.6 billion.
It’s been revealed that Porter and Elbaz were to have been paid $30 million in exchange for information that helped a consortium led by SNC-Lavalin land the contract. Roughly $22.4 million had been paid to the pair before other executives began to ask questions. At the Charbonneau Commission, the scheme was referred to as “the biggest fraud in Canadian history.”
Porter died of lung cancer in 2015 in a Panama jail while fighting a request for his extradition.
In November, Elbaz admitted he pocketed $10 million of the bribe money. He was sentenced in December to a 39-month prison term.
In 2014, Porter’s wife, Pamela Mattock Porter, pleaded guilty to laundering the bribe money and was sentenced to an overall prison term of 33 months.
In July, former SNC-Lavalin executive Riadh Ben Aïssa — who arranged for the bribe — pleaded guilty to one of 16 charges he faced in the investigation, which was dubbed Project Laureat.
Ben Aïssa admitted he created a false contract that was key to transferring the bribe money to Porter, and was sentenced to the equivalent of a 51-month prison term.
Duhaime’s was the last remaining case in Project Laureat.