Accountant balanced in his evidence
Just as the Mike Duffy trial was reaching a breaking point — with the lawyers outright snapping at one another and even reporters addicted to the nuance zoning out at the agonizing and inexorable detail of it all — it has stopped for a recess.
The case adjourned a day earlier than scheduled Thursday.
It resumes Aug. 11 for two weeks with, prosecutor Mark Holmes told Ontario Court Justice Charles Vaillancourt, former PMO chief of staff Nigel Wright slated to take the witness stand.
At that, in the courtroom a party who shall go unnamed immediately began to hum sotto voce the old XTC song, Making Plans for Nigel.
This part of the trial concerns Wright’s $90,172 bank draft that enabled Duffy to repay the Senate for allegedly improperly claimed expenses and will focus on the charge that Duffy accepted a bribe, or whether, as he and his lawyer have suggested, he was bludgeoned by Tory colleagues into doing it.
The 69-year-old suspended senator for Prince Edward Island is pleading not guilty to a total of 31 charges that also include multiple counts of fraud and breach of trust.
Given Wright’s former job in Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s office, and his connections to other high-powered Conservatives who at first seemed keen to protect Duffy, this is the most highly anticipated part of the case.
The break comes after several days of number-crunching by the forensic accountant Mark Grenon, who spent, he told Duffy’s lawyer, Don Bayne, hundreds of hours poring over Duffy’s financial records, including credit card transactions, income tax filings and chequing account, as well as all the claims he billed the Senate.
Grenon works for the Forensic Accounting Management Group in Public Works Government Services Canada; it is a specialty unit that provides its expertise to government departments and agencies such as the RCMP.
The national police force was then running Project Amble, an investigation into three troubled senators — Conservative appointees Duffy and Patrick Brazeau and Liberal Mac Harb — but, Grenon said, about 60 per cent of the 704.25 hours he spent on the file was related to Duffy. His job was to conduct a forensic analysis of Duffy’s finances.
For a witness whose mere appearance had been roundly denounced by Bayne, Grenon’s evidence was remarkably even and neutral.
Before Grenon even set foot in the courtroom, Bayne was on his feet, telling Vaillancourt he was a witness who had “aligned” himself with the RCMP team and was guilty of the most “glaring overreaching,” that he was going to “leave innuendo” about unexplained deposits to Duffy’s bank, and, playing the tiny violin to which he so often turns, cried that Duffy’s “ability to make full answer in defence,” and his own to crossexamine, was “severely” compromised.
Bayne didn’t even want the judge to hold a voir dire, a sort of mini-trial, on some of Grenon’s six reports, and urged him to kick them out at first sight because they were so unfair.
But, in fact, Grenon — a numbers guy, obviously, but with a sly sense of humour that occasionally showed itself — drew no startling conclusions about Duffy except that he consistently overspent and frequently used his line of credit to keep a balance in his bank account.
Grenon’s core function was to prove the truth of the numbers in the case — to reconcile every penny of the $493,193 Duffy claimed in travel-related expenses from the time of his appointment in late 2008 to 2013, to point to any transactions he considered suspicious and to trace Wright’s bank draft as it moved to Duffy’s then-lawyer’s law firm, morphed into a cheque to Duffy and fleetingly touched down in his account and then morphed again into a cheque to the receiver general.
There was, Grenon said, about $159,000 of deposits to Duffy’s bank account that wasn’t accounted for by his reported income — but he was also quick to say several times that the money could be explained by non-taxable sources, such as inheritances and lottery winnings, that he didn’t know about.
As for his alleged alignment with police and the Crown, Grenon told prosecutor Jason Neubauer in re-examination that he is open to meeting defence lawyers, has never yet turned down such a request, and this year alone has met five defence lawyers.
Or, as he told Bayne at one point, “I like to feel my work, because it’s impartial and independent, is for the defence, too.”
Grenon is being put forward by prosecutors as an expert witness.
His entire evidence was given in voir dire, with the lawyers to submit written arguments within a few weeks.
Then, before the trial resumes in August, Vaillancourt will decide if all, some or none of Grenon’s testimony will be deemed admissible to the actual trial.
If Duffy’s were a jury trial, jurors would have been absent from the courtroom for the entire voir dire proceeding, lest, heaven forbid, their simple minds be poisoned by hearing evidence that the judge might rule inadmissible in the end.
But Vaillancourt, being a judge and therefore presumed to be a creature of superior intellect and mental flexibility, is deemed able to “disabuse his mind” of all that Grenon said, if he were to decide it’s irrelevant or otherwise inadmissible.
I like to feel my work, because it’s impartial ... is for the defence, too