SNC-Lavalin announced Friday that it has reached an agreement with the Crown that would allow it to pay a fine of $30 million and avoid a criminal trial in connection with a long history of bribes paid to obtain a contract to repair the Jacques-Cartier Bridge in the early 2000s.
Posted at 4:21 p.m.
Updated at 6:30 p.m.
The prosecution’s thesis in this case, which stems from an investigation by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, is that the company paid approximately $2.35 million in bribes to Michel Fournier, who was then president. of the Federal Bridge Corporation, in order to be favored for the award of a public contract of 128 million. The facts allegedly took place between 1997 and 2004. Mr. Fournier has already admitted his guilt in this case and was sentenced to five and a half years in prison.
As soon as the charges were filed last September, the Director of Criminal and Penal Prosecutions (DPCP) declared that he was inviting SNC-Lavalin to negotiate a suspended prosecution agreement. It was this kind of agreement that the company had tried unsuccessfully to obtain to avoid a criminal trial in the corruption case in Libya, which had caused a crisis within Justin Trudeau’s cabinet and led to the departure of former cabinet minister Jody Wilson-Raybould from the Liberal caucus.
This time the negotiations were successful. A judge must, however, approve the agreement between SNC-Lavalin and the Crown, which will be presented in court on May 10. The consulting engineering firm was accused of fraud, conspiracy and fabrication of a false document.
SNC-Lavalin would have three years to pay the financial penalty provided for in the agreement, if it is approved by the judge. Neither the company nor the DPCP wanted to comment on the situation in more detail on Friday. The methods of calculation which led to the determination of the amount of the fine were not explained.
When a division of SNC-Lavalin pleaded guilty to corruption-related fraud in Libya in December 2019, the prosecution and defense agreed to a fine of $280 million, calculated by comparing the sentences imposed on companies involved in similar cases in the United States and the United Kingdom.
Two former executives still accused
Two former executives of the company, Kamal Francis and Normand Morin, are awaiting their criminal trial in the same case. They are accused of bribing a federal official, among other things. The agreement made by the company does not apply to them.
Deferred prosecution agreements were introduced in Canada by the Trudeau government in 2018, through an amendment to the Criminal Code. Such agreements, which make it possible to sanction a company that admits its wrongdoing without having to go through a criminal trial and a court conviction, already existed in several countries, including the United States and the United Kingdom, where they are commonly used. .
The fact of not receiving a criminal conviction also allows the company to avoid being excluded from certain public contracts.