Arthur Porter’s life, lies and lingering questions
Former Security Intelligence Review Committee chair died before facing charges here
The last time I came face to face with Arthur Porter, who is reported to have died from cancer Wednesday in a Panamanian hospital, he seemed diminished, shrunken. After leaving Canada early in 2012, his affairs in shambles and about to get much worse, Porter had stopped taking my calls. So I went to see him.
The National Post had already revealed some of Porter’s secret relationships and business dealings conducted while he served as Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s hand-picked national spy watchdog.
There was a $120-million contract with a controversial, Montreal-based middleman, Ari Ben-Menashe, involving the Russian government. Clandestine dealings, purportedly on behalf of Porter’s native Sierra Leone. Contrived diplomatic credentials, multiple passports, perceived conflicts of interest.
All of this, under the nose of the Canadian government, which Porter had sworn to serve with loyalty and integrity. It was appalling. One day after the story appeared, in November 2011, Porter resigned his position as chairman of the Security Intelligence Review Committee (SIRC). He left Canada, never to return.
Besides his reputation, he’d lost something important: access to power, and government secrets. How Porter, an oncologist by trade, had managed to land the position of SIRC chairman — and why Harper had such confidence in him — remains a troubling mystery. He’s now dead, but questions linger.
He was a talented networker. A charming person, some say. He died an innocent man, having never been proven guilty.
Of this I am sure: Porter was a liar. He lied to me many times. Bald-faced, provable, stupid lies. Caught out, he admitted some of them to me. On others, he claimed confusion or a faulty memory. There were conflicting accounts, ludicrous explanations.
He was eventually charged in Quebec with fraud and moneylaundering, on matters unrelated to Ben-Menashe and the Russian money. The province’s anti-corruption squad alleged that Porter and others had taken kickbacks worth tens of millions of dollars from former SNC-Lavalin Group Inc. executives, in exchange for helping the Canadian engineering giant land a $1.3-billion hospital construction and maintenance contract in Montreal, at the McGill University Health Centre (MUHC) where Porter had been director-general.
The contract was awarded in 2010 to a consortium led by SNC-Lavalin.
In January 2013, I dropped into a cancer clinic that Porter had set up in Nassau in the Bahamas and where, essentially, he had taken up exile. He looked smaller than the last time we had met, back when he was, he said, “at the height of my power.”
Porter brushed me off, but promised we would meet the next day. That didn’t happen; instead, he told a local newspaper that he was dying of advanced lung cancer. Later, he said he was too weak to return to Canada and answer myriad questions. He said he had done nothing wrong. In May that year, after being formally charged over the MUHC matter, he and his wife Pamela flew from Nassau to Panama, where they were immediately arrested and jailed.
Pamela Porter quit fighting Canada’s extradition request. She pleaded guilty in Quebec court last year to two counts of money laundering, related to her alleged role in the MUHC affair. She served some prison time and is now on probation.
She has reportedly disassociated herself from her husband, saying he betrayed her. Now she mourns him, with her four daughters. Porter refused to return to Canada and face his criminal charges. He remained in Panama’s La Joya prison, a filthy, dangerous hellhole, until his disease began to overtake him several weeks ago. He was admitted to a local hospital, where he reportedly succumbed.
Porter once insisted to me he had never heard of a Bahamianbased bank where, I already knew, he had had some dealings and had close ties with its director. The bank was eventually identified — not accused — in the MUHC allegations.
Porter claimed he had never heard of the notorious Ben-Menashe before the pair signed their secret contract in 2010. Porter sent the Montreal consultant $200,000 US in cash, from a Florida bank account, in an effort to secure $120 million from Russians. This, while he served as SIRC chairman.
Porter once flashed before my eyes documents purporting to establish the bona fides of his family-owned company, Africa Infrastructure Group.
He claimed his company had been authorized by Sierra Leone’s president to receive the Russian money, and to spend it on infrastructure projects in the west African country. Before I could properly examine the documents, Porter stuffed them into his briefcase. He promised to send me copies. I never received them.
Porter claimed to have associates who would vouch for his company. Those individuals — if they ever existed — did not return my phone calls.
Porter lied, I believe, to Gerhard Baur, a gunmaker in rural Ontario. Porter met Baur in 2010, after he had been appointed SIRC chairman. According to Baur, the pair concocted a scheme to build automatic weapons in Africa, meeting several times in Ontario, Montreal and the Bahamas. Baur was impressed by Porter’s wealth — the $300,000 Bentley SS, the Montreal penthouse, the beach house just outside Nassau — and his connections.
Baur spent $12,500 on a business plan and forwarded it to Porter. Nothing came of it.
In his self-financed memoir, published last year as he languished in a Panamanian prison, Porter claimed to have worked “almost exclusively with SNC-Lavalin’s central leadership, including the chairman,” in a legitimate consulting role, hence the transfer of $22.5 million to various bank accounts and enterprises allegedly under Porter’s control.
SNC-Lavalin’s chairman was, at the time, Canadian businessman Gwyn Morgan.
“I have never met Dr. Porter and didn’t know who he was until the media coverage of the MUHC allegations,” Morgan told me in an email.
Ben-Menashe, the consultant and lobbyist, followed Porter’s downward trajectory with interest, and with some alarm.
“It’s a sad day for Canada,” he said from Montreal Wednesday. “The full extent of Mr. Porter’s shenanigans will never be known ... The Quebec anti-corruption squad should be commended, and they should continue their good work.”
Their work may bring others to justice; fraud and bribery-related charges were laid against other former MUHC officials and former SNC-Lavalin executives, and a preliminary hearing into the matter began in a Montreal courtroom this year. One of the accused was missing: Porter. Now he’s gone, at 59. And that’s a pity, for several reasons.