According to the allegations, the fraud caused financial losses but also ‘caused injury’ to SNC-Lavalin’s reputation, particularly in its home base of Quebec.Mario Beauregard
SNC-Lavalin Group Inc. is suing two former executives at the centre of its bribery scandal for $127-million, alleging they embezzled the money from the company while doing deals on its behalf in Libya.
The Montreal-based engineering firm, which was charged by the RCMP in February with corruption and fraud related to its business in the North African country, is casting itself as the victim in the ongoing saga. It maintains it should never have been charged by the police for the actions of former rogue employees. Now, it has launched legal action against two of those employees.
Riadh Ben Aissa and Sami Bebawi, two former senior SNC managers, are named as defendants in the suit, filed Wednesday in Quebec Superior Court. Swiss lawyer Roland Kaufmann and Hervé Siegriest, a private Swiss banker, are also named as defendants. SNC alleges they facilitated the crime.
None of the defendants could be reached for comment.
The allegations are spelled out in a statement of claim and have not been proven in court.
The fraud caused financial losses but also "caused injury" to SNC-Lavalin's reputation, particularly in its home base of Quebec, according to the allegations.
In the statement of claim, SNC-Lavalin alleges that Mr. Ben Aissa, who steered SNC's international construction business in the early 2000s and had oversight over Libya, set up a system to siphon off the company's money with Mr. Bebawi's knowledge. According to the claim, Mr. Ben Aissa did this by setting up agent consultancies – firms that SNC typically used to help it win contracts in certain countries. These consultancies, Duvel and Dinova, were actually "alter egos" controlled by Mr. Ben Aissa, according to the allegations, and the fees he negotiated for them were for his own gain.
"The defendant Ben Aissa never disclosed to senior management within the SNC-Lavalin group of companies (with the exception of the defendant Bebawi, with whom he had agreed to share the proceeds of the embezzlement) that he was the beneficial owner of the representatives he had selected," the lawsuit alleges. "Nor did he disclose that he would personally profit from the representative agreements entered into between SNC International and Duvel and Dinova."
The suit alleges that Mr. Ben Aissa knowingly executed a number of false integrity-check certifications on Dinova in particular, meaning it was he who vouched for the company's legitimacy. SNC-Lavalin maintains it did not find out that Mr. Ben Aissa owned and controlled the two consultancies until the RCMP raided the company's headquarters in Montreal on behalf of Swiss police in April, 2012.
Mr. Ben Aissa was found guilty last year by Switzerland's Federal Crime Court of bribing Saadi Gadhafi, the playboy son of deposed Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi, to win lucrative construction projects for SNC-Lavalin while pocketing tens of millions of dollars. He was handed a three-year sentence on charges including corruption of a foreign public official but had already served most of that since his arrest and was subsequently extradited to Canada to face separate charges in another matter.
Under the terms of his Swiss plea bargain, Mr. Ben Aissa surrendered some $47-million worth of improperly obtained assets, some of which was slated to be returned to SNC. The court recognized the company as a so-called "injured party."
Mr. Ben Aissa is now co-operating with the RCMP in its ongoing investigation of SNC-Lavalin's business dealings in Libya.
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Nicolas Van Praet