SNC-Lavalin shares fall on news foreign bribery case will go to court - Stop the gravy train! No LRT in Surrey

CBC is reporting that "Shares in Canadian engineering giant SNC-Lavalin fell to their lowest level in more than two years after the company revealed the federal government has decided it won't let the company settle allegations of foreign bribery out of court."

"The company has had the legal cloud hanging over its head since 2015, stemming from allegations that some of its former employees paid bribes to officials in Libya to influence government decisions and win contracts prior to 2012. The RCMP alleges that between 2001 and 2012, the company paid almost $48 million in bribes and defrauded various other entities of almost $130 million." This is just one case of many SNC-Lavalin has been involved with.

This ties in directly with the Surrey LRT Fraud. The Director of South of Fraser Rapid Transit at TransLink is Stephan Mehr. Before that he worked over 22 years with SNC-Lavalin the dirtiest construction company on the planet that is still in court facing fraud and corruption charges.



In 2017 SNC Lavalin agreed to repay Quebec municipalities for contracts obtained through fraudulent tactics. SNC-Lavalin was charged with offering bribes worth $47.7 million to officials in Libya. They are also alleged to have defrauded various Libyan public agencies of approximately $129.8 million. SNC-Lavalin agreed to pay $1.5 million to settle a corruption case filed by the African Development Bank for ordering illicit payments to public officials to secure contracts.

Criminal charges against Arthur Porter, the man accused of committing what Quebec authorities described as the biggest corruption fraud in Canada’s history, were officially abandoned, two years after his death in a Panama prison. Porter was charged with fraud and breach of trust with regards to a hospital built by SNC-Lavalin in Montreal. The list goes on...



Global and the Financial Times has picked up on the story. This is the pattern that keeps repeating itself over and over again. SNC-Lavalin bribes politicians to get government contracts then defrauds taxpayers for much more than the bribe cost them and the work is worth. They make a huge profit from tax fraud. Here's the reason why they keep getting away with it:

Global is reporting that the wealth management spin doctors claim "Should SNC be found guilty, it could be debarred from bidding on Canadian federal work. However, we view this outcome as unlikely, noting (1) SNC has a strong case and (2) we think it is unlikely the government would allow a company employing thousands of people in Canada to fail because of the transgressions of a handful of people.” That is the ultimate lie. It doesn't have a good case. Otherwise they wouldn't keep paying millions of dollars in settlements over and over again.

They were already banned from world contracts for ten years following the company’s misconduct in relation to the Padma Multipurpose Bridge Project in Bangladesh, as well as misconduct under another Bank-financed project.. Giving them the contract to the evergreen line was a criminal act.

The spin doctors claim "we think it is unlikely the government would allow a company employing thousands of people in Canada to fail because of the transgressions of a handful of people." It's not the transgressions of a handful of people. It is their method of operation. Here's the deal. If SNC-Lavalin doesn't build it, someone else in the private sector will. No jobs will be lost. Someone else who isn't so bloody corrupt will put more money in the pockets of taxpayers and employees and less in the pockets of dirty politicians and dirty developers alike.