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The hidden key to the SNC-Lavalin scandal
By Sandy Garossino in Analysis, Business, Politics | March 8th 2019
SNC-Lavalin, a Canadian corporate giant with an established history of corruption, is charged with bribing the Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi's brutal regime over many years, in exchange for lucrative contracts.
This case is the most serious and important prosecution of corporate corruption in modern Canadian history, and we're arguing about jobs and whether Jody Wilson-Raybould is hard to get along with.
It is not only appropriate, but essential that this matter go to trial in an open and public hearing, so that Canadians can see how the world's bloodiest tyrants are cossetted, indulged, and enabled.
Perhaps the most depressing spectacle of the entire affair is watching Justin Trudeau, a man who clearly aspires to greatness, debase himself and this nation, by begging, pushing, imploring Canada's attorney general to let this company off the hook.
Then effectively firing her when she wouldn't comply, and allowing her credibility to be undermined.
Just what kind of story does he think SNC-Lavalin's caught up in, Anne of Green Gables?
SNC, a corporate giant, bribed a bloody despot's regime in exchange for billions in contracts
For 16 years the global engineering and construction giant SNC-Lavalin cultivated a close relationship with the Muammar Gaddafi family, particularly his son Saadi.
According to criminal charges, for almost a decade of that period, up until the fall of the regime, SNC paid Saadi Gaadafi almost $50 million in exchange for billions of dollars in airport, pipeline, and water infrastructure projects.
Oh, and prisons.
Let's go over that again.
A Canadian company is charged with bribing a family infamous around the world for murder, torture, rape, abductions, and widespread human rights abuses, and doing it for its own profit. They didn't stop until the regime collapsed in 2011 and Swiss authorities came knocking. Charges were laid in April 2015.
Because of corruption's profoundly oppressive impact on the Libyan people, the SNC-Libya charges are vastly more serious even than the McGill hospital bribery scandal, in which SNC paid bribes of $22.5 million to secure the contract.
Yet repeatedly and overwhelmingly from the prime minister and his advisors, the hand-wringing has focused on Canadian jobs, without substantiation of what the real job losses might be.
Not a whisper for the innocent civilians trampled under a dictator's boot.
The kind of people who don't have Michael Wernick's mobile number.
The decision whether to proceed with criminal charges is something professional prosecutors do every day, following well-established principles of which the PMO seems blindly unaware.
In the case of remediation agreements, or DPAs (deferred prosecution agreements), those principles are supplemented by new amendments to the Criminal Code of Canada. But those changes don't dramatically alter the prosecutorial landscape.
Crucially, the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) also has the benefit of the full police investigation, other court records, documents and witness interviews, including material that may never be publicly disclosed.
The only complaint that's been made over this whole scandal seems to be that the AG was not sufficiently persuaded by concerns about job losses to overturn the professional opinion of Canada's most senior prosecutor.
Canadians need a lot more context about what this case is about.
We need to talk about where this money went and who got hurt
At its heart, the SNC prosecution is the embodiment of the OECD anti-bribery framework to which Canada has long been a signatory, and on which our legislation, including DPAs, is modeled.
Corruption strikes the weak and disenfranchised first, last, and hardest.
It’s not the affluent who find bodies dumped on the side of the road, or militias opening fire on rebels and dissidents. Or have to re-assemble brutalized women and girls.
https://www.nationalobserver.com/2019/03/08/analysis/hidden-key-snc-lavalin-scandal?fbclid=IwAR3xYOxiEw0i9G0SRILtWr27VSpRVPlxqROvYbI5CDpWPq3a%E2%80%93GqWD0LfCM