Tag Archive: ethics

#LavScam latest: former SNC exec found guilty

— 12.15.2019 10:47 AM

Among other things, this verdict suggests some of us (Jody Wilson-Raybould and Jane Philpott in particular) were right when we said that crimes had indeed taken place – and that no politicians should be interfering in the resulting trials.

I wonder what they’re thinking in PMO right now? Do they ever say: “Hey, maybe we were wrong to do what we did.”

Kind of doubt it.

Former SNC-Lavalin executive vice-president Sami Bebawi has been found guilty on all counts at his fraud and corruption trial.

He will remain free until sentencing.

Bebawi, 73, was on trial over the last six weeks at the Montreal courthouse. The jury had been deliberating since Thursday.

Serving as the firm’s executive vice-president from 2000 to 2006, Bebawi faced five charges in all: fraud, bribing a foreign public official — former dictator Moammar Gadhafi’s son, Saadi Gadhafi — laundering the proceeds of crime, and two counts of possessing property obtained by crime.

Throughout the trial, the Crown positioned Bebawi as the man behind what it described as SNC-Lavalin’s “business model” in Libya: paying millions in kickbacks and bribes to keep obtaining lucrative contracts.

“The company adopted an unusual, unlawful and dishonest practice,” Crown prosecutor Anne-Marie Manoukian told jurors in her closing arguments, “by artificially inflating the prices of contracts, paying bribes and misappropriating money for personal gain.”


Comments (34)

Does Kaleigh Rogers seem like an honest person to you?

— 11.26.2019 10:23 AM

She’s a CBC reporter.  She wrote to me in October, when I was feeling pretty down.

I saw it as a nice note.  Human to human.

At this point, I think I’d be forgiven for thinking this exchange was wholly personal.  Perhaps she had had experience with depression, too, perhaps she was simply being nice.  But she sure wasn’t being a CBC reporter.  I asked her about that.

She was living in New York.  After that exchange, I thought nothing more of it.

Until I heard from former Daisy Group staff that she was calling them, that is. I was a bit stunned by that: had she actually been pretending to be nice to me, so I’d lower my guard? Wasn’t that unethical?

I told her I thought she had engaged in deception. I also said to her: “Anyone looking at [those messages] would feel as I do – that you were not being straight with me.  At all.”

I felt she had breached CBC’s journalistic standards and practices.  I felt she had breached their code of conduct.  But I didn’t make a complaint.

Seeing now the story she has produced – in which she and Andrea Bellemare gratuitously, and without any relationship whatsoever to the story, mentioned that my marriage had broken up (winning her the tweeted support of CBC meat puppets Harry Forestell and Lucy van Oldenbarnev) – I wonder if I should have.

Kaleigh Rogers is an unethical reporter.  Stay away from her (and the others).


Comments (11)