Well, it wasn’t the SNC-Lavalin deal that saw federal cabinet ministers lose their jobs before the last election.
But it was a deal just the same.
Trading in the company’s stock was halted shortly before SNC-Lavalin was supposed to appear at a pre-trial hearing in Montreal on Wednesday for fraud, bribery and corruption charges over the way it landed contracts in Libya.
At the hearing, a division of the company pleaded guilty to one fraud charge while the other corruption charges were dropped, with the prosecution and the company agreeing the firm should pay a $280-million fine over the next five years. The company would also be on probation for three years.
The plea deal also, however, appears to do what the company was seeking to do when pressure was brought to bear on then-justice minister Jody Wilson-Raybould to allow the company to settle its charges with what’s known as a deferred prosecution agreement (DPA) before the last election.
After its subsidiary filed its guilty plea Wednesday, SNC-Lavalin told shareholders that it did not expect that there would be any further ramifications from the conviction.
A DPA would mean that the company would not be found guilty of the charges it faced and could instead pay a fine and commit to cleaning up its behaviour in the future.
At issue were federal government integrity rules that prevent companies convicted of corruption charges from being eligible to bid on federal contracts for 10 years. The company argued that the 10-year ban could cripple the company and made its case to senior Liberals who, according to Wilson-Raybould, then applied unreasonable pressure on her to allow SNC to have its way.
After its subsidiary filed its guilty plea Wednesday, SNC-Lavalin told shareholders that it did not expect that there would be any further ramifications from the conviction.
As the company put it in a news release, “The company does not anticipate that the guilty plea by a construction subsidiary (which has not bid on any new contracts since it was charged in 2015) will affect the eligibility of SNC-Lavalin Group companies to bid on future projects that are aligned with the SNC-Lavalin Group’s newly announced strategic direction, and continuing to serve its strategic clients here and abroad. While it is possible that the guilty plea by the subsidiary may present risks in the near-term, the company believes these risks will be manageable and does not anticipate that the plea will have any long-term material adverse impact on the company’s overall business.”
The deal still has to be approved by the courts, but since it was a joint recommendation from both the prosecution and the defence, it is likely to stand.
That doesn’t mean it shouldn’t leave a bad taste in everyone’s mouths.
Because, just as it did before, this plea certainly makes it look as if companies get to buy their way out of punishment for their bad deeds.
And this time, it’s all happening right there in front of us, instead of in the back rooms of the Liberal government.
