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QUÉBEC — Parti Québécois leader Pauline Marois is suing a political opponent for slander, filing a $900,000 lawsuit against Action démocratique du Québec finance critic Gilles Taillon.
In court documents filed in Quebec Superior Court on Thursday, Ms. Marois said the ADQ member made “false and slanderous” accusations when he associated the PQ leader with the “worst financial scandal in Quebec history.”
Last week during a news conference, Mr. Taillon said that when Ms. Marois was finance minister in 2001, she intervened against the advice of civil servants to ensure that Vincent Lacroix, the disgraced founder of the mutual fund firm Norbourg Asset Management Inc., received nearly a million dollars in tax credits. Mr. Taillon said that Mr. Lacroix used the money to prolong the life of his near-bankrupt company, which went on to defraud 9,200 investors of $130-million.
Mr. Lacroix was found guilty of 51 Securities Act violations and sentenced earlier this year to 12 years in jail.
“In 2001, Pauline Marois allowed Norbourg to survive and she has to give explanations … because her action may have saved Vincent Lacroix from bankruptcy and paved the way for the scandal that we know today,” Mr. Taillon said last week.
When asked to retract his comments, Mr. Taillon refused.
In the court documents, Ms. Marois said she had nothing to do with giving any money to Mr. Lacroix and Norbourg, and that she never intervened in the matter. She explained that a tax credit would not have been approved by the Finance Ministry rather than the Quebec Revenue Ministry.
The ADQ member's attacks were “unmerited and malicious” and were damaging to Ms. Marois' reputation, dignity, honour and fundamental rights, the court documents say.
“I have nothing against sharp exchanges. It adds some bite and sometimes that's necessary. But not false and slanderous comments and that's the difference here,” Ms. Marois told reporters yesterday in Montreal.
Mr. Taillon was unavailable for comment yesterday, but his lawyers explained in a document sent to Ms. Marois' legal council this week that numerous news reports involving the Norbourg scandal revealed that the company's founder bribed a Ministry of Finance employee to get the tax credits.
“Mr. Taillon's comments about the irregularities committed by the Ministry of Finance in 2001 are but a reminder of the facts that were already in the public domain…through the province's media,” the lawyers stated.
However, the trustee in bankruptcy appointed to recover Norbourg funds for defrauded investors said in a court document that an “analyst in the Ministry of Revenue” was “illegally paid” by Norbourg to obtain tax credits for Vincent Lacroix.
Mr. Taillon has demanded a public inquiry into the government's handling of the Norbourg affair while Ms. Marois was in office.
