A story in CBC News detailed a Radio-Canada investigation that uncovered an apparent kickback scheme which saw $1.5 million in illicit payments routed through Swiss bank accounts in exchange for the award of a $127 million contract to refurbish Montreal’s Jacques Cartier Bridge:
Radio-Canada’s investigative program Enquête has uncovered a money trail suggesting that almost $1.5 million in suspected kickbacks ended up in Swiss bank accounts of a former Federal Bridge Corporation boss, shortly after SNC-Lavalin was awarded a $127-million contract in 2000 to refurbish Montreal’s Jacques Cartier Bridge.
Twenty days after the Federal Bridge Corporation, a Crown corporation, awarded the contract to SNC-Lavalin, Michel Fournier, the former head of FBC, opened a bank account in Zurich and gave it the code name “Zorro.” In January 2002, as work began, Promotag SARL. — a commercial agent used frequently by SNC — began making deposits into accounts controlled by Fournier that would total $1,448,083.44.
The report states that the RCMP is currently investigating the matter.
J. Nicol and D Seglins, “SNC-Lavalin bridge contract linked to $1.5M in suspected kickbacks,” CBC News, February 13, 2014.
In another Quebec procurement scandal, a report by Sun News provides new details uncovered by a Charbonneau Commission investigator about a Hydro-Quebec dam project where workers were paid to do no work for two years in a deal brokered by their trade union:
QUEBEC CITY – The Quebec government did nothing to stop Hydro-Quebec from paying a dozen crane operators to sleep, play cards or just stay home rather than work at a dam-building site. The wasteful spending that came to light this week at the Quebec corruption inquiry actually emerged in 2009 at a legislature committee.
The public utility paid off the crane workers to calm their concerns about German workers who had been shipped in to the Peribonka dam site north of Quebec City in 2005. The Quebecers had protested the foreign presence by staging a work slowdown, the inquiry heard this week. Quebec Federation of Labour executives arrived on site to broker a deal that saw the Quebecers paid not to work while Germans operated the cranes.
The Quebec union members received 100% of their salary and even got bonuses from 2005 to 2007. Meanwhile, many of them stayed home, slept in trailers or just hung around. “It was tolerated, and everyone knew it,” inquiry investigator Michel Comeau testified.
The report is the latest in a long-running series of revelations regarding widespread spending improprieties involving public procurement contracts in Quebec.
