Sports complex project turned into a fiasco | Montrealer Magil accused of “looting” Cameroon

In Cameroon, it is the “Magil affair”. The Montreal contractor is abandoning a vast sports project near the capital Yaoundé and is demanding penalties, after having received the equivalent of 90 million Canadian dollars for the contract. The poor African country is indignant and its Minister of Sports accuses Magil Construction of having “robbed” the State, in a letter to its Prime Minister made public.

Magil may remain discreet, but the entrepreneur has been at the heart of Montreal’s real estate development for 40 years. Owned by the French group Fayolle, the company participated in the construction of the Bell Centre, several skyscrapers, the Jewish General Hospital and the headquarters of the Canadian Space Agency.

Magil is also leading in Cameroon. The firm is multiplying soccer infrastructure projects in this country without a call for tenders. None of them are really finished according to the government, despite spending nearly 300 million since 2018, in a country among the poorest on the planet and plagued by corruption, according to Transparency International.

Among these infrastructures, the new 60,000-seat stadium in Olembé was able to host the African Cup of Nations just in time, at the start of 2022.

The government initially entrusted its construction to the Piccini group. In 2019, this Italian contractor had already erected the bulk of the building, but he claimed cost overruns of 28 billion CFA francs, or $61 million.

Cameroon refused, then withdrew the contract, to entrust it without a call for tenders to Magil.

The Montreal contractor finished the stadium in disaster. But above all he had to see to the construction of a substantial phase two: a gymnasium, an Olympic swimming pool, basketball, volleyball and handball stadiums, as well as four tennis courts. Despite the billions of CFA francs paid to Magil, they never came out of the ground.

An angry minister

The Press obtained a letter from the Minister of Sports, Narcisse Mouelle Kombi, sent to the Prime Minister of Cameroon. The Minister criticizes Magil for having pocketed three quarters of the funds provided, while only carrying out 1.3% of the work he was supposed to do.

In the process, he also accuses the contractor of having “implemented stratagems to artificially inflate his services through the slowing down of works, their pure and simple stoppage, overbilling, double billing” and “the exponential remuneration of the expatriate staff.

In interview with The Press, an adviser to the minister, Cyrille Tollo, points out that Magil was initially demanding payments for 61 expatriate employees in Cameroon for the project. “Some were charging 1.35 million CFA francs a day,” he says. The equivalent of about $3000.

These allegations of overcharging for Magil employees have been circulating for months in Cameroon.

Asked by The Press in August, a senior executive at Magil’s parent company, Fayolle Canada, assured in an email that these sums do not represent the salary paid directly to an expatriate, but “all the structural costs of the company”. They would include air transport, children’s schooling and housing, in particular. “African cities are among the most expensive in the world,” says senior vice-president Hugues Fastrel.

Towards lawsuits?

According to the Minister of Sports, Magil keeps in its accounts the equivalent of 8.7 million lent by the State to be able to advance the work, as well as an advance of 48 million.

According to the missive from his boss, the contractor is claiming 10% of the costs as a penalty for the premature end of the project, even though he himself has decided to withdraw from it. Under the terms of the original contract, obtained by The Presssuch a payment would amount to almost 12 million.

Unpaid subcontractors

The minister’s letter also mentions that Magil refuses to pay a total of 13 billion CFA francs ($28 million) to its subcontractors. Among them, the French entrepreneur Razel-Bec claims 10 billion. He is suing the Montreal company in France and in Cameroon and even had Magil’s accounts blocked in this country for a time.

Razel-Bec also asked the International Court of Arbitration to intervene to get paid. The company is claiming sums for work at the Olembé Sports Complex, but also on a road construction site which should improve the road link to another stadium in Douala, the country’s economic metropolis.

Again, Magil replaced another contractor without a call for tenders. Here too, work is progressing at a snail’s pace, and the subcontractors are not being paid.

Last August, Magil defended himself before the Court of Arbitration by placing the blame on Cameroon. According to the contractor, it is impossible to remunerate the subcontractors, since the State itself has stopped honoring its invoices. The contracts he signed with Yaoundé make him the simple manager of the projects, of which the government remains the financial backer.

But Cameroon is demanding details of accounts payable before transferring the money to Magil, suspecting various wrongdoings. The government has decided to “suspend the payment of accounts [factures] “, to avoid” seeing the project budget exhausted, without a single planned deliverable being completed, “says the letter from the Minister of Sports.

The situation has been going on for months. In August, The Press asked Magil why Yaoundé refused to pay its bills for the Olembé stadium. The owner of the company, Fayolle Canada, then denied any serious problem.

“Your information is inaccurate, the advancements have all been approved and the payments are in progress,” wrote Hugues Fastrel, senior vice-president of Fayolle Canada. Five months later, that is clearly not the case.

Magil did not respond to new questions from The Press on his withdrawal from Olembé.

The local boss would have been in prison

The letter from the Minister of Sports of Cameroon about Magil Construction mentions the strange arrest of a leader of the Montreal entrepreneur in this country.

“For six months, under false allegations of illness, Mr. Franck Mathière, vice-president of Magil and main manager of the project (Olembé sports complex), was missing. And it was much later that we learned that he was under arrest in Ukraine, ”said the Minister of Sports.

At Fayolle Canada, Hugues Fastrel confirms that Franck Mathière was the subject of a red notice from Interpol, at the request of Nigeria. According to the magazine Young Africathis country suspected him of money laundering and fraud of 2.2 million US dollars against a hotel group.

The Ukrainian authorities would have arrested him in October 2020, and he could not leave the country until March 2021, the media said in an article on this subject.

Hugues Fastrel points out in his email that the red notice against his employee has been canceled. “The Interpol secretariat has communicated this decision to all the national central offices of each country and prohibits any international police cooperation on this file. »

Magil and Fayolle Canada declined to give further details on the circumstances and reasons for the arrest of its Cameroonian projects leader.