Tag Archives: SNC Lavalin

Canada’s SNC-Lavalin Scandal: Why Prime Minister Trudeau Was Wrong To Interfere, Even Though He Was Right on the Merits

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This past year, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has been embroiled in allegations that he improperly intervened in one of Canada’s biggest-ever foreign bribery prosecutions. That prosecution, of the Canadian construction firm SNC-Lavalin, began back in 2015, when the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) and the Public Prosecution Service of Canada (PPSC) announced they would be bringing charges against the firm for paying approximately CA$48 million in bribes to Libyan government officials to win contracts, and for related misconduct including the defrauding of Libyan companies. This past February, the Globe and Mail reported that Prime Minister Trudeau and his closest advisors had inappropriately attempted to influence the SNC-Lavalin prosecution, and a subsequent inquiry by the Ethics Commissioner found that Trudeau had indeed acted unethically in attempting to influence key prosecutorial decisions that are supposed to be made by the Attorney General. The scandal had political consequences: although Prime Minister Trudeau and his Liberal Party managed to hang on to a minority government in October’s elections, the Liberal Party lost 27 seats and the popular vote.

The specific prosecutorial decision that Prime Minister Trudeau attempted to influence concerned whether the government should negotiate a deferred prosecution agreement (DPA) with SNC-Lavalin. A DPA is a settlement in which the defendant agrees to penalties or other remedial measures, and in return the government agrees to suspend the prosecution, and eventually drop the charges if after an agreed period of time the defendant has complied with the terms of the agreement. A DPA is similar to a plea bargain, but it does not require the defendant to plead guilty, and so avoids imposing on the defendant the stigma and collateral consequences of a criminal conviction. The prosecutor who brought the charges denied SNC-Lavalin’s request for a DPA in late 2018, and the acting Attorney General, Jody Wilson-Raybould, declined to overrule that decision. The Attorney General’s decision is supposed to be final on such matters. Nonetheless, Ms. Wilson-Raybould claims she fielded ten phone calls from the Prime Minister’s office, and was invited in for ten in-person meetings with the Prime Minister and his advisors, regarding this decision—and that the Prime Minister was pushing her to pursue a DPA with SNC-Lavalin. Ms. Wilson-Raybould refused to reconsider her stance on the matter, and shortly afterwards she was removed from her position as Attorney General and named instead Head of Veteran Affairs. In the end, the interference was exposed, the pressure failed, and, unless there’s some other unexpected turn of events, SNC-Lavalin will be going to trial.

This affair raises two questions: First, was Prime Minister Trudeau correct that the prosecutors should negotiate a DPA in this case? Second, if the answer to the first question is yes, was it appropriate for the Prime Minister to press his Attorney General to pursue that approach? My answer is yes to the first question, but no to the second. On the one hand, Prime Minister Trudeau was correct, and Acting Attorney General Wilson-Raybould was incorrect, about the appropriateness of a DPA in this case. However, the principle of prosecutorial independence from political influence—especially in corruption cases—is far more important, and the Prime Minister should never have compromised this core value even if he was right on the merits of this individual decision. Continue reading →

To Catch Big Fish, the World Bank’s Integrity Vice Presidency Should Pay for Tips

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The World Bank’s Integrity Vice President (“INT”), responsible for investigating corruption and fraud in World Bank projects, recently released its Fiscal Year 2015 Annual Update. INT had a busy year, opening 323 preliminary investigations, of which 99 were selected for full investigation, and closing 81 investigations, with three-quarters finding evidence of sanctionable conduct. (A primer on how INT conducts external investigations is here.) Some of INT’s recent cases, such as those brought against Alstom SA and SNC-Lavalin, involve large companies. Yet despite these examples, the data in the Annual Report raises questions about whether INT is sufficiently effective in uncovering corruption and fraud by large companies. The evidence suggests not: The firms debarred in FY 2015 are mostly small- and medium-sized enterprises—minnows, not sharks. The longest debarment leveled was for thirteen years on N.C. Sanitors and Service Corporation, essentially for paying public officials in Liberia and falsely claiming it collected trash that it never picked up. The challenged contract was worth about $350,000—not exactly a break-the-bank amount, especially considering the largest contracts the World Bank awarded last year were worth $438 million, $98 million, and $53 million (excluding government-awarded contracts funded by World Bank loans).

Perhaps large corporations with World Bank contracts and governments officials administering large World Bank loans are not engaging in corruption—but I doubt it. It’s much more likely that INT does not have the information that it would need to investigate and seek to sanction large companies. According to people familiar with INT’s intake system, while INT gets thousands of tips a year through its phone and online tip lines, many of which prove valuable (either individually or when aggregated), relatively few tips relate to large contracts where the amount of money at stake enhances the harm from corruption and bribery. INT should therefore develop methods to get actionable information on fraud and corruption related to large projects. My suggestion: pay for information.

One reason why INT may receive few tips about large contracts is that INT currently only offers confidentiality to protect whistleblowers. When it comes to large contracts, the likelihood that a whistleblower will face repercussions if her tip is revealed increases, changing the cost-benefit analysis of reporting. Some potential whistleblowers with actionable information might need some sort of additional material incentive to offset the potential risks. A well-structured system using payments to induce reporting might therefore increase the amount of actionable information INT receives about large-contract corruption.

What would such a system look like? How should it be designed? While this is not the place to lay out the proposal in all its details, the essential elements might work as follows: Continue reading →

When Should Corruption Be Tolerated? The Case of the Padma Bridge

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In a recent post, Rick examined the Canadian Supreme Court case concerning a high-level corruption scheme implicating Bangladeshi government officials and executives at SNC Lavalin, a Canadian construction company, over a cancelled World Bank project in Bangladesh. The $1.2 billion project underlying the case was the Padma Bridge, a massive infrastructure that some estimated would increase the Bangladeshi GDP 1.2% each year.

Upon discovering the corruption scheme in 2011, the World Bank—recognizing the importance of the infrastructure project for the Bangladeshi people—initially responded by attaching conditions to the continued funding of the bridge. Specifically, the Bank requested that the Bangladeshi government (i) place all public officials involved in the investigation on leave pending the completion of the investigation, (ii) appoint a special inquiry and prosecution team, and (iii) agree to provide full access to investigative information. However, on June 29, 2012, the World Bank cancelled its funding of the project, deeming the Bangladeshi government’s response “unsatisfactory.”

Although neither the World Bank nor SNC Lavalin are involved in the project anymore, the government of Bangladesh is nonetheless moving ahead with the Padma Bridge, and has awarded the construction contract to a Chinese firm. Since the World Bank withdrew its involvement, the estimated cost of the bridge has climbed by over US$1 billion, and the expected completion date is being pushed back by two years to 2020. These climbing costs and greater delays suggest not only less efficiency, but also that even more money is being siphoned off by corrupt public officials, to the detriment of the Bangladeshi people.

Because of this, it may seem that the World Bank’s decision to disengage from the project, and allow the Bangladeshi government proceed on its own–without any Bank oversight–was a misguided policy. I understand this view, but on balance I do not agree. While the World Bank’s decision to terminate its involvement in the project may have increased costs and corruption in the short run, in this case the Bank made the right call. That does not mean that the Bank should have a “zero tolerance” policy that requires it to suspend any project where there is evidence of corruption of any kind. But in the particular circumstances of this case, withdrawal was the best of the Bank’s bad options.

Continue reading →