Former bureaucrat Chuck Guité has been found guilty of all counts of fraud in the wake of the federal sponsorship scandal.
The decision by an eight-man, four-woman bilingual jury of the Quebec Superior Court came after seven days of deliberations.
Mr. Guité was detained immediately after the judge revoked his bail. Pre-sentencing arguments will take place Friday. Mr. Guite said he would appeal the verdict.
The jurors decided that they leaned more toward the Crown's contention that he was a co-conspirator in a massive fraud rather than a victim, as the 62-year-old retired civil servant contended.
The verdict also signals that the jury wasn't willing to give him the benefit of the doubt when he said that any irregularities in the sponsorship program stemmed not from criminal intent but from the panic that seized Ottawa in the wake of the 1995 referendum.
Mr. Guité was charged with five counts of fraud for awarding five contracts worth about $2-million to Groupaction Marketing Inc., the firm of Montreal ad executive Jean Brault. The Crown said little or no work was done.
Mr. Brault had already pleaded guilty to the same charges and was sentenced last month to 30 months in a penitentiary. The Crown is expected to ask for a stiffer penalty against Mr. Guité, because of his key role as a civil servant managing large sums of public money.
Mr. Guité defended himself after parting with his lawyers before the trial, saying he had run out of money. In addition, he commuted daily from Ottawa to Montreal where the trial took place because Mr. Brault had initially been a co-accused.
The verdict marked the first time a jury had looked into the scandal stemming from the millions of dollars Ottawa poured into Quebec events to bolster its presence after the 1995 referendum.
“I make no excuse for the way the (sponsorship) program was administered between 1995-1999. It was done with little resources, to the best of our abilities, under the circumstances of the day,” Mr. Guité told jurors.
But while Mr. Guité said he acted at the directive of his political masters in an attempt to tamp down separatist fervour in Quebec, the five contracts for which he was tried produced little to promote federalism.
Two of those contracts, worth $480,000, were to promote the federal Justice Department's new gun registry. Officials at the Justice Department and the firearms registry however testified that they had not commissioned the work and that no services were provided anyway.
The other three contracts, worth more than $1.5 million, were to study potential sponsorship opportunities.
However, they yielded only haphazard reports with little analysis, mostly of listings of events. Jurors heard a marketing professor tell them that a first-year student would get a failing mark for such shoddy work.
Other witnesses described how the federal government and Groupaction scrambled in the spring of 2002 to reconstitute the three reports after The Globe and Mail asked for them under the Access to Information Act.
Political favoritisms was undeniably woven into the genesis of at least one of the five contracts, the Crown attorney told jurors.
Alain Renaud, who worked as an unregistered lobbyist for Groupaction, testified that Mr. Guité told him to cultivate the Liberal organizer Jacques Corriveau, a friend of then prime minister Jean Chrétien.
Mr. Renaud also said he was advised to ally himself with ad executive Jean Lafleur, also known for his ties to the Liberals.
Crown attorney Jacques Dagenais told jurors that acting at the order of political masters is no excuse for a civil servant to commits fraud.
“Did you see any evidence that a politician told Guité, `You give a contract to Jean Brault to do nothing' ?”
