Trial abortions follow and resemble each other in anti-corruption investigations in Quebec. Americo Comparelli, a former civil servant who was convicted of breach of trust last year because he was secretly paid to help companies pay less tax, has finally benefited from a halt in the legal process last minute Monday, before having time to receive his sentence.
“Mr. Comparelli, I suppose that ends your stay with us here”, dropped Judge Salvatore Mascia, of the Court of Quebec. Moments earlier, the prosecutor for the Public Prosecution Service of Canada, Mr.e François Blanchette, threw in the towel and demanded that the judicial process be stopped.
The former federal official then stood up and left the Montreal courthouse as a free man. A major turnaround for him, when he risked several years in prison until then.
Extensive RCMP investigation
Americo Comparelli was arrested by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) in 2014 as part of Project Coche, a major corruption investigation at the Montreal offices of the Canada Revenue Agency.
Mr. Comparelli was then working as a financial auditor in the scientific research and experimental development department of the tax authorities. But according to the police, he was also a “silent” partner of the consulting firm Delvex, whose specialty was to submit research and development tax credit applications. Customers therefore paid him to help them with their requests, which were then studied by him and his colleagues.
In December 2020, in a 144-page long-running judgment, Judge Mascia found the former public servant guilty of breach of trust, conspiracy to breach of trust and conspiracy to commit fraud against the government.
The magistrate had underlined how the file had turned out to be complex and voluminous. “The trials for fraud – especially those involving tax fraud and corruption as in this case – are becoming more and more complicated,” he observed.
For 800 proof boxes
But before the judge had time to hear the pleadings on the sentence to be imposed, an unexpected event disrupted everything.
Other defendants pinned in another part of the Coche project, and who were accused of having organized a system in which tax officials received bribes in exchange for their benevolence, had their trial in turn, last winter. Among those accused was former construction contractor Tony Accurso.
Defense attorneys at the Accurso trial discovered that the RCMP and the Public Prosecution Service of Canada, the federal Crown, were working from copies of documents seized during searches in 2008 and 2009.
The originals had been taken away by the provincial tax authorities, Revenu Québec, which was conducting its own investigation of this same group of entrepreneurs, and which kept everything in about 800 boxes of evidence at its offices.
Were there any differences between the originals and the copies? Perhaps certain passages were missing in the copies which would have allowed the accused to be exonerated? The defense wanted to have access to the 800 boxes of evidence to find out, and they were entitled to it, the court ruled.
But the prosecution was unable to provide all of this new material in time to comply with the scales set by the Supreme Court in its Jordan ruling on the right to be tried within a reasonable time. The Accurso trial was therefore aborted.
Ball caught on leap
The lawyers of America Comparelli, Me Alexandre Bien-Aimé and Me Andrée-Anne Dion, grabbed the ball. They announced that even though their client had already been found guilty, they would submit a motion for an abortion trial in light of these new findings, since these hundreds of boxes of evidence had never been disclosed to their client, which they argued had affected the fairness of the proceedings.
Seeing that it was heading towards the same result as in the Accurso case, the Crown requested that the judicial process be stopped against Mr. Comparelli, as well as against a co-accused, the entrepreneur Francesco Bruno, who, for his part, had not yet had his trial. “We are going to ask for the process to be stopped in both cases,” prosecutor Blanchette told the judge.
This new setback by the federal police force and the Public Prosecution Service of Canada comes three weeks to the day after the collapse of the corruption trial of the former mayor of Terrebonne. In this case, it was the Permanent Anti-Corruption Unit (UPAC) and the Director of Criminal and Penal Prosecutions (DPCP), the provincial Crown, who had been blamed for having hidden from the defense information that could have damaged the credibility of ‘a witness.