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Posted on 06/28/2006 6:07:09 PM PDT by GMMAC
Prosecutors poring over more sponsorship files
Further charges could be laid as police submit reports on ad work
TU THANH HA
Toronto Globe and Mail
Wednesday, June 28, 2006
MONTREAL -- Crown attorneys have in their hands more files from police investigations into the federal sponsorship scandal and are studying them, says the prosecutor who handled the fraud trial that led to the conviction and jailing of former bureaucrat Chuck Guité.
"There are files that have been forwarded," prosecutor Jacques Dagenais told reporters yesterday.
"Other files will be coming. I'm quite sure of that. We are examining some of them."
While Mr. Dagenais could not elaborate, the Gomery public inquiry and Ottawa's recently amended civil suit against ad agencies involved in the sponsorship program contain allegations such as billing for work not done, double-billing and counterfeiting.
A pretrial hearing in Mr. Guité's case last fall was told that two different police forces, the RCMP and Sûreté du Québec, are investigating the scandal.
The court heard that investigators executed search warrants and seized boxes of documents at three agencies that earned millions of dollars in federal contracts: Lafleur Communication Marketing, Groupe Polygone Éditeurs and Gosselin Communications Stratégiques.
Amended last month with further details and figures, Ottawa's civil suit against firms that benefited from sponsorship contracts alleges that: Lafleur Communication and its president, Jean Lafleur, improperly kept $315,000 from the federal government that should have been transferred to Canada Post for a 1997 sponsorship of a hockey-themed stamp launch. (A 1997 Canada Post invoice suggesting that the Crown corporation did collect the sponsorship money was found at the offices of Lafleur Communication. But Canada Post filed an affidavit last year at the Gomery inquiry saying that the invoice was bogus.)
Mr. Lafleur and his son, Éric, invoiced the government for nearly $250,000 for work in several sponsorship contracts that they hadn't actually done.
Lafleur Communication billed both the RCMP and the Public Works Department for the same $54,000 promotional items.
Gosselin Communications invoiced the federal government for nearly $180,000 for work that wasn't done.
A friend of former prime minister Jean Chrétien, Jacques Corriveau, set up "a secret system of kickbacks" in return for access to millions of dollars in sponsorships for Polygone, with Polygone paying Mr. Corriveau through bogus invoices.
Mr. Dagenais said the authorities are busy investigating sponsorship-related cases. "Work is being done by several attorneys and investigators," he told reporters yesterday.
He made his comments after a brief court appearance where he announced that he would not present a case in a remaining conspiracy charge pending against Mr. Guité and his co-accused, ad executive Jean Brault.
Mr. Justice Fraser Martin then said he would declare both men acquitted of the conspiracy charge.
With both Mr. Guité and Mr. Brault already sentenced respectively to 42 and 30 months in federal penitentiaries on four counts of fraud, it would have been "a waste of time" to hold another trial, Mr. Dagenais told reporters.
"They already have been found guilty on that fraud count. It would have been redundant," he said.
The Crown agreed in March to a suggestion from Judge Martin to sever the conspiracy charge from the original fraud indictments against Mr. Guité and Mr. Brault because it was more complex to prove in a jury trial.
A Crown witness at Mr. Guité's trial, Jean Lambert, testified last month that he overheard the bureaucrat and Mr. Brault talk about a $330,000 contract to promote the new federal firearms legislation for which no services were actually provided.
"Yes, but Chuck, we'll have to do some work for that," Mr. Lambert said he heard Mr. Brault tell the bureaucrat.
"It's all right. If there are questions, we'll say we threw away the documents and destroyed the mockups," he said Mr. Guité replied.
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Roosting Chickens? LOL!
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