SNC-Lavalin 2020

SNC-Lavalin 2019

How big a fine for former SNC exec? Judge hints at ‘unique amount’
Decision is delayed as discussions continue on time period for Sami Bebawi to pay up.
Former SNC-Lavalin vice-president Sami Bebawi might face an unprecedented fine after he was found guilty last year of fraud and corruption while the company carried out a series of contracts for the Gadhafi regime in Libya.
A decision on the fine was expected on Monday, but Quebec Superior Court Justice Guy Cournoyer ordered a delay when he raised questions about when Bebawi, 73, should pay up.
The Crown contends Bebawi has the means to pay $23 million immediately, but prosecutor Anne-Marie Manoukian suggested an eight-year time period “to be reasonable in my request.”

28 February
Prosecutor says no deal was offered to SNC-Lavalin due to severity of charges and past behaviour
In the interview, Ms. Roussel said it was inappropriate to grant a DPA to the Montreal-based engineering and construction giant because the offences were so serious. They centred on allegations that the company paid $48-million to influence the awarding of government contracts under Moammar Gadhafi’s regime and allegedly defrauded various Libyan organizations of roughly $130-million.
“The factor that really weighed against a remediation agreement was really the severity and breadth of the offence,” said Ms. Roussel, the director of the Public Prosecution Service of Canada. “It was long in time – if you look at the hierarchy of the company, how high the scheme went in the hierarchy of the company. I think it is a pretty unprecedented offence in Canada and as a result of that, I didn’t feel it was in the public interest.”
Another factor in rejecting a DPA was SNC-Lavalin’s past behaviour. In 2013, for example, the World Bank imposed a 10-year ban on the company due to corruption and bribery allegations in Bangladesh.
In her first media interview since assuming her role in 2017, Ms. Roussel said she had “no knowledge” that the Prime Minister’s Office was trying to persuade Ms. Wilson-Raybould to end the fraud and bribery case against SNC.
“I had no knowledge of the political pressure she was feeling until the story broke in The Globe and Mail so I was entirely shielded,” she said. “At the end of the day, I was pretty much immune. I made my decision and informed the attorney-general and from there on it was her issue to deal with.”

24 January
SNC-Lavalin’s ‘poor’ LRT bid should have been tossed, evaluators found
Documents shed light on why city’s own technical evaluation team failed company’s Trillium Line bid
City of Ottawa awarded $1.6-billion light-rail contract to SNC-Lavalin after officials said bid should be rejected
(Globe & Mail) New documents reveal the City of Ottawa awarded a $1.6-billion light-rail transit contract to SNC-Lavalin even though city officials warned the bid was fatally flawed and should be rejected.
The city released the documents around 9 p.m. (ET) Thursday evening at the end of a busy local news day in which city officials were on the defensive over a host of problems with another LRT line that opened to the public in September.
The system, called the Confederation Line, runs east and west with a tunnel through the downtown. That line has faced a range of problems, including broken switches and malfunctioning doors. Public complaints spiked up this week when the number of trains in service dropped after several were pulled out of service for maintenance.
The 16-kilometre Trillium Line extension, which includes a connection to the airport, was awarded to a consortium led by SNC-Lavalin in March, 2019.
Earlier that month, CBC News reported that SNC-Lavalin won the Trillium Line contract even though it fell short of the minimum technical score required.
The city acknowledged in August that the Montreal-based company missed the 70-per-cent threshold, while two other bids exceeded the cutoff.
A review of the contracting process by the city’s Auditor-General, released in November, found city staff acted within the rules by allowing the SNC-Lavalin bid to continue to the next phase, which focused on cost.
In the end, the SNC-Lavalin bid came out with the highest combined score. … The October, 2018, documents released this week reveal for the first time that the issues with SNC-Lavalin’s bid were substantial. The city’s evaluation team documents for SNC-Lavalin include a section divided into strengths and weaknesses, with weaknesses vastly outnumbering the strengths.

22 JanuaryFormer Bombardier exec to take on new role as chief transformation officer at SNC-Lavalin
SNC-Lavalin Inc. has recruited a former Bombardier executive who oversaw key asset sales to oversee the engineering and construction firm’s strategic transformation.
Louis Veronneau will take on the new role of chief transformation officer, which includes possible divestments and reducing costs. The mergers and acquisitions specialist led negotiations to sell Bombardier’s majority stake in the C Series to Airbus, a stake of its rail division to the Caisse de depot et placement du Quebec and its Downsview site in Toronto to a pension fund.
The chief transformation officer is one of three new positions created to improve cash flow and sustainable growth for SNC-Lavalin.
As president of the infrastructure sector, Jonathan Wilkinson will look, among other things, at the existing turnkey projects — worth around $3.2 billion at the end of the third quarter — which are included in the SNC-Lavalin order book.
Dale Clarke has been appointed acting executive vice-president of infrastructure services to grow North American “high performance” services, such as those involving engineering.
As part of its new strategy, SNC-Lavalin has stopped bidding on fixed-price contracts, where cost overruns are absorbed by the contractor, in order to turn greater attention to engineering services, where the risks are lower.

2 January
Was the public interest and Canada’s legal and moral obligation served in SNC-Lavalin conviction?
By Errol Mendes.
“There are substantial reasons why Canada’s legal, moral and indeed the public interest may well have been better served if the DPA had been granted to the parent company, and not only settle for a guilty plea and conviction of one of its subsidiaries.”
(iPolitics) In essence, what happened with the conviction of the subsidiary company was that the parent got a DPA by another means. This is because a fraud conviction as opposed a bribery conviction does not trigger a debarment under the CFPOA law unless it can be considered a fraud against the government as opposed to the charges looking more like a fraud against the Libyan government and people.