MONTREAL - The trial of Tony Accurso and his co-defendants, the result of a decade of investigative work by authorities into corruption at the Canada Revenue Agency, collapsed on Thursday. The work required to provide the additional 802 boxes of evidence requested by the defence on time was found to be simply insurmountable.
“My client is happy, very relieved,” said Marc Labelle, who represented Accurso together with his colleague Kim Hogan.
Earlier, François Blanchette, prosecutor for the Public Prosecution Service of Canada, appeared in court and filed an order to stop the judicial process, which had been bogged down for months.
Allegations of bribes for preferential treatment
Accurso was co-accused with entrepreneur Francesco Bruno, accountant Francesco Fiorino and two former tax officials: Adriano Furgiuele and Antonio Girardi. The charges stemmed from Project Coche, an RCMP investigation into corruption at the Canada Revenue Agency.
The prosecution said that Accurso had paid bribes for preferential treatment for his businesses. Each of the two officials would have received approximately $700,000, traced by the police to accounts in Switzerland. The charges included fraud, conspiracy, breach of trust and forgery.
The trial opened in January but was never able to sufficiently address the issues around the responsibility of each of the accused.
From the outset, the defence questioned the abundant evidence that had been seized by authorities over the years and how the mountain of documents had been preserved for a decade.
When the case opened, the police were not even involved. It started with an investigation by the Canada Revenue Agency, which suspected companies of tax evasion. The tax authorities had searched Accurso’s companies and other companies related to the case in 2008 and 2009. An official who testified at an earlier stage recounted how the Revenue Agency had seized “an astronomical number of documents and digital information.”
During its investigation, the Revenue Agency discovered that it was not just dealing with simple tax evasion. Suspects appeared to be working with corrupt officials. The case had taken a new turn and, as early as 2008, the RCMP had launched its own investigation into suspicions of corruption within the federal agency.
Revenu Québec joins the case
In the meantime, Revenu Québec considered that the suspects probably evaded provincial taxes as well. Its investigators conducted a search of the premises of the Canada Revenue Agency in 2011 and seized the hundreds of boxes of documents accumulated since the start of the federal investigation, because they felt they needed them for their own provincial inquiry.
The Canada Revenue Agency and the RCMP continued their own work with copies of documents deemed relevant from the mountain of evidence.
When the corruption trial opened last January, however, the defence began to worry that not all relevant documents had been disclosed to them.
The disclosure was made from working copies kept by federal authorities. But where were the originals seized from Accurso and his companies? Maybe some details were different between the originals and the working copies? Perhaps the working copies were missing some very important documents that would have allowed the accused to be exonerated?
Investigators said the original evidence seized during the searches of 2008 and 2009 was now in 802 boxes stacked at Revenu Québec. By eliminating duplicates and empty boxes, that number could probably be reduced to 600 boxes of evidence.
The defence wanted access to all the original documents, which amounted to hundreds of thousands of pages. And it was entitled to have them, ruled Quebec Court Judge Mélanie Hébert.
Colossal task, with time running out
The prosecution therefore had to go through these hundreds of boxes of documents, analyse their content, scan and number each page, ensure that everything was transmitted to the defence in an intelligible, indexed, sorted, classified manner, with the possibility to carry out research. Everything included, even though the original documents contained handwritten documents, invoices, checks, Post-its, and forms in various formats.
The task was colossal, and time was running out. The Supreme Court’s ruling in the Jordan decision set very clear guidelines on the right of an accused to be tried within a reasonable time. The work that remained would almost certainly have extended the trial well beyond these deadlines.
“After analyzing all of the circumstances, we determined that we could not comply with our obligations within the parameters set by Jordan,” Blanchette said.
It marks another victory for Accurso, who was already acquitted in 2019 on corruption charges in Mascouche, Que. “All that’s left for him to do now is wait for the Court of Appeal’s decision in the Honorer case,” said Labelle.
Project Honorer was an investigation into corruption in the City of Laval by Quebec’s permanent anticorruption unit (UPAC). Accurso was found guilty in the case but appealed the verdict.
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