The former president of the executive committee of the City of Montreal Frank Zampino, accused of corruption in a case of granting municipal contracts in exchange for political financing, will finally have to be tried.
The Court of Appeal ordered the trial to take place on Friday, four years after the City’s former number two and his five co-defendants obtained a stay of proceedings.
Mayor Gérald Tremblay’s former right-hand man was arrested in 2017 as part of Operation Fronde. But Judge Joëlle Roy, of the Court of Quebec, ruled in 2019 that Mr. Zampino’s constitutional rights had been violated during the investigation, in particular by the granting of a wiretapping warrant which targeted conversations between him and his lawyer.
Judge Roy had invalidated the evidence obtained by this technique by the investigators of the Permanent Anti-Corruption Unit (UPAC), and therefore all of the evidence in the case, by invoking a “boondoggle” in the investigation.
The end of the legal process also affected the five co-defendants of Frank Zampino, Bernard Poulin and Dany Moreau, of the SM firm, Kazimierz Olechnowicz, of CIMA+, Normand Brousseau, of HBA Teknika, as well as Robert Marcil, former director of infrastructure and roads to the City of Montreal. The Court of Appeal also overturned the decision in their case.
All had been accused of fraud, conspiracy and corruption as part of a system of awarding municipal contracts to engineering consulting firms in exchange for payments into the coffers of Union Montréal, then headed by Gérald Tremblay, between 2001 and 2009.
“The judge erred”
UPAC investigators had been authorized, as part of the Fronde project, to intercept the conversations of 39 “targets”, including communications with unknown people. Electronic eavesdropping allowed the interception of certain conversations between Frank Zampino and his lawyer, conversations for which professional secrecy must be protected.
But according to the Court of Appeal, even if the police were negligent in the wiretapping operation, these actions were not of a serious nature that would justify stopping the legal process.
Such a police investigation sometimes requires extensive resources, and the investigators did not use abusive procedures, note judges Manon Savard, François Doyon and Patrick Healy.
They also raise several errors of law by Judge Joëlle Roy, as well as a poor evaluation of the evidence. “The judge erred in concluding that the stay of proceedings was necessary to prevent continuing injustice to Mr. Zampino,” they wrote in their judgment.
“As a remedy, the Court instead orders the exclusion of the evidence from the wiretap. It overturns the judgments of first instance and orders the holding of a trial,” we can read in the summary of the decision rendered by the Court of Appeal.
Frank Zampino was also accused, then acquitted in 2018, of fraud, conspiracy and breach of trust in the Faubourg Contrecœur scandal.