The film arrives on screens, more than 15 years after the outbreak of the largest securities fraud orchestrated by Quebecers to shake the province. In norbourgthe team of director Maxime Giroux did not have to sink down the path of fiction as reality was enough to support the plot.
The thriller shines more of the spotlight on Éric Asselin (played by Vincent-Guillaume Otis) than on the founder and president of Norbourg, Vincent Lacroix (François Arnaud). The angle thus reflects the observation of journalist Yvon Laprade who, in The autopsy of the Norbourg scandalpublished in 2009, camped this former investigator for the Quebec Securities Commission (now the Autorité des marchés financiers), who became Lacroix’s right-hand man, in the role of architect of the financial arrangements behind the embezzlement of some 130 million dollars and the circumvention of regulations which caused 9,200 victims.
Vincent Lacroix was on his side the leading head, the catalyst, the “gold boy of finance in Quebec, combining charm and manipulation to propel Norbourg to the top. A momentum that was part of a context of emulation supported by the effervescence of the Quebec ecosystem of asset management at the time, and which must be remembered.
The dream of a Quebec inc. financial
At the end of the 1990s, under the impetus of the PQ government, major institutions had (by granting mandates, in particular) stimulated the emergence of a Quebec inc. in the management of financial assets.
The Caisse de depot et placement du Québec went further in its response to this political order by creating Services financiers CDPQ in 1997. The idea echoed the alarm sounded a year earlier by National Action on the deportation of Quebecers’ savings. The Caisse then appropriated the theme of the exodus of savings, which was based on the argument that Quebecers provided 21% of the assets under management of Canadian funds, but that Quebec managers controlled less than 5% of the market.
The CDPQ embarked on the adventure by taking stakes in management firms, law firms and distribution networks with, as a priority, the establishment of funds with a high Quebec content. It was a failure.
This was followed by a progressive disengagement and load shedding that lasted until the mid-2000s. A load shedding from which Norbourg largely benefited. The specialist magazine To advise will later remember that each of the creatures of the Caisse de dépôt — or emanations emerging from the ashes of CDPQ Financial Services — ended up in bankruptcy (Argentum), in a financial scandal (Zénith, Norbourg) or on sale at a discount (Teraxis, Fonds Évolution , Cartier Fund and StrategicNova).
But it wasn’t all a story of the CDPQ’s unfortunate intervention in a world it had less control over.
In Quebec, this period also saw the alleged embezzlement at Cinar, the alleged fraud at Jitec, the tangle of offshore accounts at Norshields, or even the Mount Real nebula, made up of 120 related companies. At the time, there was a certain regulatory laxity, a lack of means, a deficiency in the rules of governance and the application of the principle of compliance, as well as a porous border between the fiduciary, management and distribution functions. This resulted in a lack of local means of prevention and intervention. The reactions of the authorities came late; they have since corrected the situation.
Punish economic crimes
All this also occurred in a penal environment with little deterrence, which imposed rather symbolic sentences.
In criminal justice, violations of the Securities Act were punishable by a maximum fine of two million dollars, accompanied by a ban on acting as a director for a specified number of years. And in criminal justice, it was traditional to patronize economic crimes and dilute the seriousness of securities offenses because they usually did not cause victims or because the harm caused was only financial.
In the wake of the Enron accounting malpractice scandals that dominated the news in early 2000, there has been a strengthening. Each charge can now be accompanied by a prison sentence and a maximum fine. And these penalties can be combined.
Vincent Lacroix was the first accused under the new terms of the Securities Act; his case will have served as case law. For the judicial annals, the sentence that the fallen manager had to serve was the strongest ever pronounced at the Canadian penal level for an economic crime. The right to pronounce consecutive sentences was also retained, in full recognition of the new parameters of a law that was intended to be more punitive.
Seen from this angle, the sentence — even reduced — against Vincent Lacroix was intended to be dissuasive and came to elevate economic crime to the rank of serious offenses in Canada. But it is true that elsewhere, in other territories, white collar criminals do much less well.