Two men who had gone to a lawyer in Mont-Saint-Hilaire to shoot him through the door of his house were sentenced to nine years and ten years respectively in prison at the Longueuil courthouse on Monday, while a major real estate developer charged in the same case is still awaiting trial.
Daouda Dieng and Cheikh Ahmed Tidiane Ndiaye had been acquitted of attempted murder, but found guilty of discharging a firearm in a way dangerous to the victim, at the end of their trial before judge Stéphane Godri.
The facts date back to the evening of March 26, 2020. The two men went to the house of lawyer Nicholas Daudelin, south of Montreal. Me Daudelin, in his testimony, said that an individual asked him to confirm his identity through the window of his front door.
“I know it’s you,” the man standing outside reportedly said. A second suspect would then have emerged from the darkness, a black pistol in his hand. Hit by a bullet in the leg, M.e Daudelin had immediately made a connection with one of his court files, in which he represented the Mouvement Desjardins against the real estate developer of Joliette Jean-François Malo. He had told his spouse to quickly call the other lawyers involved in the file with him.
“I said: ‘Malo shot me, call them, we have to get them to safety.’ They have children, I was afraid of a coordinated attack,” he said during his testimony.
Suspected fraud
Me Daudelin had explained that he first knew Jean-François Malo in the context of a dispute with the Caisse populaire de Joliette. In 2019, he then undertook on behalf of the Fédération des caisses Desjardins du Québec a series of civil actions in connection with suspicions of fraud on the part of the group of companies of Mr. Malo. There followed a “rolling fire” of proceedings on both sides, a conflict which led the two parties to court “every week”, according to him.
At the trial of Daouda Dieng and Cheikh Ahmed Tidiane Ndiaye, the prosecution demonstrated that Malo had met one of the defendants in person shortly before the attack on Mr.e Daudelin. The judge acknowledged that the attack on the lawyer was for the benefit of Malo and that the victim was targeted because of his status within the system.
“The judge recognized that the particular facts of the case warranted a sentence at the high end of the range,” commented Crown prosecutor M.e Tian Meng, from the Serious Crime and Special Affairs Bureau of the Director of Criminal and Penal Prosecutions (DPCP).
For the moment, however, the proof has not been made that Malo ordered the attack or participated in it, as the theory of the prosecution requires. The real estate developer is accused of attempted murder in the same case and will have his trial at an undetermined date.