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 be held on Friday, after the City’s former number two and his five co-defendants obtained, in 2019, a stay of proceedings against them.
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, affirmed 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 invalidated all of the evidence obtained by this technique by investigators from the Permanent Anti-Corruption Unit (UPAC).
The end of the proceedings 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 at the City of Montreal. The Court of Appeal also reversed 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 payment into the coffers of Union Montréal, then headed by Gérald Tremblay.
According to the Court of Appeal, even if the police officers were negligent in the wiretapping operation, these actions were not of a serious nature that would justify a stay of the proceedings.
“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 judges Manon Savard, François Doyon and Patrick Healy, of the Court of Appeal.
More details to come.