Category: SNC Lavalin

SNC-Libranos

CTV;

Conservative Leader Andrew Scheer says he will release new information related to the SNC-Lavalin affair on Sunday.
 
In a Saturday afternoon press release, Scheer said he will present new documents related to the scandal that has plagued Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government.
 
Scheer’s team did not specify what type of information is in the documents or how many pages will be released. The announcement is scheduled for 2 p.m. in Ottawa.

h/t David Murrell

Update: I hope this isn’t it. If so, how lame.

SNC-Libranos

Morning headlines.

…vindictiveness for vindictiveness’s sake

‘This isn’t about a lack of loyalty’

Trudeau’s Dumb Expulsions and Strange Compulsions

Tuesday Night Massacre

Whew! Glad that’s over – time to move forward.

Export Development Canada has hired outside legal counsel to review some of its dealings with SNC-Lavalin. The review comes after a company insider told CBC News the engineering giant secured billions in loans from the Crown agency over the years, some of which he alleges was intended to pay bribes.
 
If true, it could mean taxpayers have unwittingly backed illegal payments.
 
Export Development Canada is a federal agency that provides financing and insurance to Canadian businesses operating abroad.
 
The insider, who worked on several large projects funded by EDC, claims it was an “open secret” within SNC-Lavalin that “technical fees” listed in budget proposals included cash to be used as bribes to secure international contracts.
 
Those line items could total millions of dollars. The insider says EDC’s internal due diligence policies should have detected something was going on.
 
He says “technical fees” were part of a larger “lexicon of bribes” used within SNC-Lavalin. […]
 
He says the problems with the technical fees should have been caught by EDC auditors for two reasons. First, he says, they were listed as Canadian expenses, but a portion flowed to consultants or “agents” on the ground in foreign countries to help the company win contracts.
 
The second red flag, he says, should have been the sheer size of the technical fees, which could total as much as 10 per cent of a project’s overall budget.

“Due diligence” didn’t catch it. Funny, that.

SNC-Libranos

You knew this was coming;

Materials submitted to the Commons Justice Committee this week indicate Jody Wilson-Raybould recorded at least one of the contentious conversations at the heart of the SNC-Lavalin affair, multiple sources tell CBC News.
 
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has said Wilson-Raybould’s exit from cabinet was a result of a “erosion of trust” between Wilson-Raybould and the Prime Minister’s Office. The existence of a recording suggests that trust may have broken down well before she left cabinet on Feb. 12.
 
The audio recording, or a transcript of it, is expected to be part of a new submission to the committee from Wilson-Raybould to be released later today. That submission also includes a written statement, emails and text messages.

Related.

Update and bumped: The recording is out.

And… reaction.

The Libranos: SNC Lavalin

Here come da judges.


More Welcome to the Tet offensive of Charter rights: This was the week it became necessary to destroy the village of good government in order to save it.

The Libranos: SNC Lavalin

Andrew Coyne;

Wait, I thought it was all Scott Brison’s fault.
 
The usual anonymous sources are now whispering to reporters that the reason Jody Wilson-Raybould was fired as minister of justice and attorney general in January had nothing to do with her refusal to kill the prosecution of a Liberal-friendly firm in a province critical to the party’s election chances, as the prime minister and a phalanx of top officials had pressured her to do. No, according to reports by Canadian Press and CTV, it was because of her pick for a judicial appointment. […]
 
Several points are worth noting about this obviously deliberate leak. One is the casual violation of the very confidentiality provisions that are supposedly so sacred to Trudeau that he cannot fully release Wilson-Raybould, even today, from their clutches.
 
The second is the willingness, in the service of undermining the credibility of the former attorney general, to smear not only her — apparently in addition to being “difficult” and “in it for Jody,” she’s a crazed social conservative — but a sitting judge.

Sounds cordial.

Next: HERE COMES DA JUDGE!

Update!

They had to ask?

The Libranos: SNC Lavalin and The Buffalo Chronicle

Links to this site keep popping up in the comments, so I decided to take a look.

From February;

Sources close to the Conservative opposition leader have told The Chronicle, on the condition of anonymity, that Scheer has reason to suspect that Brison’s resignation on January 10th was part of a wider effort to shield the government and Bank of Montreal executives from wide-ranging improprieties related to the former Kinder Morgan pipeline and its subsequent acquisition.

And this, on March 11th: ‘Political grandmaster’ Frank Iacobucci is at the center of SNC Lavalin, Kinder Morgan scandals

Iacobucci led SNC-Lavalin‘s efforts to secure a ‘Deferred Prosecution Agreement’ last summer and into the fall. He was instrumental in persuading Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to insert the new legal provision as a policy rider into last year’s budget bill, acting as SNC Lavalin’s in-house attorney. […]
 
Iacobucci sits on the Board of Directors of Torstar, the company that publishes The Toronto Star, The Hamilton Spectator, GTA Today, The Niagara Review, iPolitics, and a series of smaller newspapers. He formerly served as Chairman. The Toronto Star, in particular, has earned a reputation for left-leaning opinion pages and reliably favorable coverage of Liberal politicians.

It’s all highly detailed, so I won’t bother excerpting more. Nor can I provide any opinion on the legitimacy of the content. But one thing’s for sure, it’s gotten under Justin Ling’s skin.

Related? Susan Delacourt’s also testy. (She writes for the Star).

The Libranos: SNC Lavalin

“There’s much more to the story that should be told.”

This is Philpott’s first interview since she resigned over Trudeau’s handling of the SNC-Lavalin controversy. She believes, as she put it, that “there’s much more to the story that needs to be told” but that it can’t come out because “there’s been an attempt to shut down the story”—an attempt she attributed to the Prime Minister and his close advisors.
 
But she is also keenly aware, because she has been hearing from Liberal colleagues, that “there are people who are afraid that they’re not going to get elected because of what I did.” As she described that anger, the former minister said: “My only way of living with myself on that, is that this is not my fault. I did not start this.” Now she is trying to figure out how to see it through.

Update: Grab a chocolate bar, and bask in his éloquence.

The Libranos: SNC Lavalin

Whew! Glad that’s over.

Opposition MPs briefly stormed out of the Justice Committee meeting Tuesday morning, after reporters were given a document outlining a Liberal motion to discuss hate crimes the morning after publicly calling for an end to the SNC-Lavalin investigation.
 
On Monday night, the five Liberal MPs in the the Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights sent a letter to the chair of the committee saying they believe the “all rules and laws were followed” by government staff in relation to SNC-Lavalin, and that “Canadians now have the necessary information to arrive at a conclusion.”

Now we can sit back and let the money rain down on us.

Related.

The Libranos: SNC Lavalin

And the wheels on the bus go BUMP – BUMP – BUMP.

‘Recent events have led me to conclude that I cannot serve as Clerk of the Privy Council and Secretary to Cabinet during the upcoming election campaign. Therefore, I will be taking steps to retire from the public service well before the writ of election is issued.’

Related? Michael Wernick’s son worked for Liberal MP behind SNC-Lavalin cover-up

But wait, there’s more!

The Libranos: SNC Lavalin

As I was saying…

With accusations of SNC-Lavalin corruption extending to nine countries, including Canada, there is good reason to believe that the practice was systemic, and that the rot may extend to government officials and government departments.

Update

Recommended listening: Podcast of the Breckenridge Radio. (Note: the original quoted comment contained an error in fact, so I’ve edited to remove that)

h/t Joe

Oh, Shiny Prime Minister!

This is rather extraordinary;

Ms. Caesar-Chavannes, a first-term MP from the Toronto area, said she had told Mr. Trudeau in a phone call on Feb. 12 that she would be announcing her decision not to run again in the October election. She said Mr. Trudeau told her to wait, because Ms. Wilson-Raybould had quit cabinet that day. She felt that he was worried about “the optics of having two women of colour leaving,” Ms. Caesar-Chavannes said.
 
A source with the PMO who was not authorized to discuss details on the record said Mr. Trudeau was concerned that her decision would be associated with the SNC-Lavalin affair, but did not raise any concerns about race.
 
Ms. Caesar-Chavannes said she had told him that she hoped he could one day understand the impact that political life has had on her family. She said threats to her safety have been made against her in the past.
 
“He was yelling. He was yelling that I didn’t appreciate him, that he’d given me so much,” Ms. Caesar-Chavannes said.

And it’s not behind the paywall, either. Huh.

The Libranos: SNC Lavalin

Watching as Liberals profess a new and desperate devotion to saving other peoples’ jobs, I’m beginning to wonder if the real fear surrounding a potential SNC-Lavalin criminal trial isn’t about electoral politics at all, but about what might come out during testimony.

This company has a history of bribery, lest we forget…

Bumped for this update: my spidey senses may be correct. (Sorry! linked fixed)

Is the true purpose to prevent a public trial, rather than save jobs?

 

[…] Is it because Riadh Ben Aïssa has been cooperating with authorities, and his and others’ testimony at trial might be much more damaging than anyone can guess?

The Libranos: SNC Lavalin

And then, as if by magic, a proposal for deferred prosecution agreements was buried into page 202 of the 2018 federal budget.

The DPA circle was now squared—and with barely any scrutiny. A little over two weeks later SNC met one last time—on July 5—with both Bouchard and Marques, the latter now also in the PMO.
 
All that was left was for SNC to be offered its deferred prosecution agreement. Only the offer never came. On Sept. 4, 2018, the government said it would not offer a DPA to SNC.
 
The shock must have been immense; to the company, to the political staff who took the dozens of meetings and to the bureaucracy that had done the same.

Recommended reading.

The Libranos: SNC Lavalin

There’s a 7:45am news conference tomorrow, after which Trudeau is scheduled to board a plane.

It seems a bit early in the day to be flying off into the sunset.

In the meantime, here’s a couple questions nobody’s going to ask: Do they not have enough lawyers inside the Justice Department? And how many employees does a company need to hire to become immune from criminal prosecution? (Asking for a friend).

Butts Testimony Live

Sorry, I got distracted and forgot this joker was testifying this morning — live feed at CPAC.

POLLSPOTTING: Who do you believe more on the SNC-Lavalin affair? (CTV Ottawa)

Question round: Basically, his strategy is to call JWR a liar. And, can’t remember.

Random reactions from various Twitter feeds.

Update: I’ve been busy with work and life, so couldn’t pull a full round up. Suffice it to say that the op-eds will be flying tomorrow after Wenrick’s second round of sanctimony before the committee.

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