Former SNC-Lavalin executive vice-president Sami Bebawi failed to overturn the guilty verdict for fraud and corruption he received in 2019 in connection with the company’s activities in Libya. The Quebec Court of Appeal therefore ordered him to report to the penitentiary within 48 hours to begin serving his eight-and-a-half-year sentence.
The prosecution theory in this case was that Sami Bebawi was involved in paying millions of dollars in bribes to Saadi Gaddafi, son of Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi. Incidentally, Sami Bebawi and one of his relatives allegedly received $26 million in embezzled funds in the early 2000s.
The victim of the fraud was the Libyan state, which had paid an inflated price for public contracts carried out by SNC-Lavalin.
After a jury trial, Sami Bebawi was found guilty in December 2019 of fraud, bribery of a foreign public official, laundering of the proceeds of crime and concealment. Judge Guy Cournoyer had also imposed a fine of 24.7 million dollars to be paid within six months.
The role of a lawyer analyzed
Mr. Bebawi’s lawyers had raised two main grounds for appealing the verdict. In particular, they disputed part of the investigation carried out by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) in this case. The police had carried out an undercover operation targeting one of Mr. Bebawi’s Montreal lawyers, Mr.e Constantine Kyres. Some communications from the latter had also been intercepted. The evidence at trial showed that Mr.e Kyres offered $10 million to a witness to change his story in Mr. Bebawi’s case.
The Court of Appeal recognized that this part of the investigation violated the solicitor-client privilege and his privileged relationship with Mr. Bebawi, but determined that an exception applies in this case since the relationship between the attorney and client “was part of the pursuit of a criminal purpose”.
Mr. Bebawi’s lawyers were also asking for an automatic acquittal on certain counts of fraud since, according to them, there was no risk of economic loss for a company that had concluded an agreement with SNC-Lavalin in Libya and cited as a victim. . The Court of Appeal did not accept this argument. “At the end of the day, it was first and foremost the Libyan state that was the victim,” underlines the judgment, by judges François Doyon, Guy Gagnon and Christine Baudouin.
The court, however, agreed to give the former executive vice-president two years rather than six months to pay his fine.
Pill hard to swallow
At the end of his trial, Mr. Bebawi filed a written statement with the court, highlighting the exceptional work of SNC-Lavalin employees in the field and deploring that certain senior executives were able to get away with this case without consequence.
“These employees have delivered every assignment given to them with honor, often away from their families, in inhospitable countries for long periods of time. They deserved better. Rather, they have seen several “untouchables” abandon ship without any consequences to date. It must be a hard pill for them to swallow,” he said in his letter.