Accurso trial aborted, millions missing

Last year, the corruption trial of entrepreneur Tony Accurso, his collaborator Francesco Bruno and two former tax officials was aborted due to unreasonable delays under the Jordan ruling. Thanks to unprecedented access to the evidence gathered by the police, The Press reveals today how they proceeded, according to the investigators, to make disappear abroad millions of dollars of bribes.

Vincent Larouche
The Press

It was all because of pornography. Nothing more, hammered Antonio Girardi.

It was January 21, 2010, in Bern, Switzerland. Girardi, a former auditor at the Montreal office of the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA), had been fired by the federal government a few months earlier. He had been searched at his home. Articles in the Canadian media had revealed that he was the target of an investigation by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), called Project Coche, which stemmed from information received as part of another criminal investigation into the Montreal mafia. Reports indicated that Mr. Girardi, his colleague Adriano Furgiuele and their friend, construction entrepreneur Francesco Bruno, held bank accounts in Switzerland, and that they were suspected of being involved in large tax evasion schemes involving the businesses of construction magnate Tony Accurso.

Swiss justice had therefore frozen their accounts and opened an investigation for money laundering. Mr. Girardi had gone to Bern to convince the Swiss to unfreeze his funds, since the Canadian investigation was based on wind, according to him.

“They investigated 19 years of my life. I am accused of having received and kept “inappropriate” mail. To be clear, to have received pornographic mail in my mailbox, ”explained Mr. Girardi, according to the report of his interrogation written by a Swiss federal prosecutor.

The search at his home had revealed “nothing important”, he assured.

He did have an account in Switzerland with a few hundred thousand dollars, which might seem odd for a Canadian tax official, but the money did not really belong to him, he said. He had only agreed to put money from his entrepreneur friend Francesco Bruno in his name, to help him protect himself from creditors in Canada who were ruining him.

“The funds did not belong to me, I only rendered a service to Mr. Bruno,” he said, still according to the minutes. “I have never received any money for this” and “I have never violated the obligations arising from my employment”, he added.

A problem of “racism”, according to Furgiuele

Francesco Bruno and Adriano Furgiuele also went to Bern to plead their case and convince the Swiss to unfreeze their funds.

Adriano Furgiuele alleged that he had been wrongfully terminated from his job at the CRA. He said he was a victim of racism.

“I am of Italian origin and automatically I was cataloged as a Mafioso. Overall, there is a latent problem of racism in Quebec, ”he argued, according to the Swiss minutes. He too claimed that the money in his Swiss account did not belong to him, that he had only agreed to put the funds of Mr. Bruno and his company in his name.

Francesco Bruno had given the same version. He had explained to Swiss prosecutors that he had been scammed by former associates in Canada and found himself crippled with debt. To protect his company’s funds, he had hidden them first in the Bahamas (a tax haven), then in Switzerland (one of the countries most famous for its banking secrecy). Since he didn’t want to involve his wife and children in this maneuver, he had asked Girardi and Furgiuele to put their names on the accounts, in order to have trustworthy guarantors in case something went wrong. But all the money was his, and it had been earned legally, by the sweat of his brow, he said.

“I was looking for a way to be able to place some profits in a safe place that could not be seized by creditors,” he said, according to the minutes. The money was then divided into three parts and part was sent to the personal accounts of Girardi and Furgiuele, even though the funds really belonged to Bruno, according to his version. He thought he was thus obtaining “an additional degree of protection against a tax audit”.

The Swiss authorities had shown themselves convinced. There was no evidence that the three men’s money was the proceeds of crime. The accounts had been unfrozen. Francesco Bruno was able to recover $1.9 million. Girardi and Furgiuele had been able to recover approximately $740,000 each. Shortly after, the money had disappeared without a trace.

“Favorable tax treatment”

The Swiss minutes analyzed come from the evidence that was to be presented in court at the corruption trial of Girardi, Furgiuele, Bruno and Accurso. The trial opened a year ago in Montreal, but collapsed before the court could examine the case on the merits.

The defense had sought disclosure of 802 boxes of additional evidence, and the prosecution realized that it would be unable to make them available in time to meet the timelines mandated by the Supreme Court’s Jordan decision, which requires the holding of a trial within a reasonable time. On July 8, the Public Prosecution Service of Canada threw in the towel and called for a halt to the legal process.

Thanks to the steps of the lawyers of The Press in court, we were able to obtain a copy of the evidence gathered by the RCMP in this case. The police allegations could not be put to the test of the courts, and the abortion of the trial means that all the defendants are innocent to date.

But according to the police, the money hidden in Switzerland did not come from legitimate activities. These were bribes paid between 2005 and 2008 by construction tycoon Tony Accurso to curry favor with tax officials.

“The circumstantial evidence confirms that Accurso and the companies over which it exercised control […] benefited from preferential tax protection or treatment,” writes Crown prosecutor François Blanchette, in an exposition of the prosecution’s theory.

Francesco Bruno himself confirmed having made several contracts with Tony Accurso and knowing him for a long time. He was also close to tax auditors Adriano Furgiuele, his cousin, and Tony Girardi, his close friend. According to police, Bruno helped Accurso curry favor with officials.

Official records seen by police indicate that Girardi and Furgiuele have been assigned over the years to audit Mr. Accurso’s businesses for tax purposes. A witness even recounted having seen them in the offices of Mr. Accurso’s companies, as part of their work. Girardi’s spouse and Furgiuele’s girlfriend, who also worked as auditors, were also assigned for a certain period to the files of the companies in question.

Tony Accurso’s group of companies was doing big business at the time: in some years, its turnover approached half a billion dollars.

“Given the importance of the tax amounts at stake for the companies in question, it is obvious that being able to benefit from the “benevolent attention” of auditors from the Canada Revenue Agency constitutes a marked advantage for Accurso. “, sums up M.^and Blanchett.

fake invoices

The millions of dollars paid by Tony Accurso to Bruno, Girardi and Furgiuele were taken directly from the accounts of his companies, according to the RCMP, who say they have found checks signed by him and false invoices for fictitious expenses intended to camouflage the real use of funds.

“This way of doing things allowed him to take fraudulent money out of his companies to appropriate it personally, in particular to make corruptible payments to Furgiuele, Girardi and their accomplice Bruno”, explains the Crown prosecutor.

No one within his companies seemed to monitor the entrepreneur’s use of the funds. “He had the authority to make his deals and pay the people he had to pay. It’s his company, he has the power, he has the authority, then it’s his money, ”testified Frank Minicucci, former right-hand man of Tony Accurso, at the preliminary investigation.

The money paid by Mr. Accurso was first placed in the Bahamas through the services of fund manager Martin Tremblay, affiliated with the Geneva private bank Ferrier Lullin, according to the analysis of the movement of funds made by the RCMP.

Mr. Bruno himself confirmed in his interview with Swiss prosecutors that it was a Royal Bank of Canada adviser, Nathalie Racine, who had referred him to Martin Tremblay, telling him that she had redirected several clients Canadians to the financial advisor based in the Bahamas (M^me Racine did not respond to requests for comment from The Press).

Mr. Bruno also said that the arrest of Martin Tremblay by the American authorities in 2006 and his sentence to 48 months in prison for having illegally transferred funds through his company had caused him headaches, since he had no interlocutor able to recognize that his money was really his. He finally managed to transfer everything to Swiss bank accounts in his name as well as in the names of MM. Girardi and Furgiuele.

Part of the money went through a shell company registered in Panama, and through a bank account in Singapore (two tax havens). In 2009, Switzerland temporarily blocked the funds, until the three men went to Bern to explain their origin. When they managed to get the funds released, they disappeared.

“The RCMP has lost track of the funds in question,” concludes the Crown prosecutor in his document.

There remained the criminal charges. Tony Accurso, Francesco Bruno, Antonio Girardi and Adriano Furgiuele faced a series of charges between 2012 and 2018, including breach of trust by a public official, forgery, fraud and conspiracy. They risked many years in prison.

The abortion of the trial, last July, eliminated this risk definitively.