SNC Lavalin Back In The Game

SNC Lavalin is back in the game after a wrist slap from the Canadian courts.

The following is from Randy Chatterjee, who has been following the financial paper-trail from the RAV/Canada Line project; and it ain’t pretty.

The SNC Lavalin/Caisse/ROTEM consortium won the faux BC Liberal P-3 contract and by doing so, made the Canada Line a pseudo private line, which means it is extremely difficult to get financial particulars via FOI. Mr. Chatterjee has persisted for over a decade and a half to find the truth, something which the BC Liberals and the NDP are loath to do

One just has to ask;

Where is the mainstream media?

 

It appears to me that SNC received everything they wanted.

Rule of law?  The law was clearly broken, multiple elected and senior government officials tried to cover it up, a felony offence was admitted—one that normally carries a jail term—and then everyone involved is given a bye.
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So this means the penalty in Canada for government contracting fraud involves not even a slap on anyone’s wrist, but only a trivial $280 million fine for a company with an historical gross profit margin in the double digits on current revenues of over $10 billion.
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The fine might amount to 10-15% of their longterm average annual profit.
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Welcome to a corporate kleptocracy, where SNC, its Board, officers, employees, and/or co-conspirators in government and quasi-government entities like RAVCO (the “proponent” of the RAV aka Canada Line) defraud taxpayers worldwide and NOT ONE SINGLE PERSON is held to account criminally.
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At some point a very dogged investigative reporter will manage to FOI the total annual payments from Translink, and possibly the Province separately via a back door, to an entity called IntransitBC LLP.  Then one needs to net out the bare operating costs of running the subway line, calculate a net present value of these “P3 capital recapture payments”, plus the total dollars paid by our governments from 2005 to 2010 for construction of the RAV Line, and then compare this total to the actual amount authorized by Translink to be spent from the public purse.
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The Translink Board, the “Responsible Agency” for approving all RAV costs, authorized no more than $2.3 billion for all capital expenses.  We know Translink was paying IntransiyBC LLP over $120 million per year in the first few years of the subway’s operation.  At that payment rate over 30 years, given reasonable assumptions of costs to run an 18-km driverless line, the capital cost of the subway would be between $4 and 6 billion, likely over double what was authorized for a project PriceWaterhouse Coopers estimated should have cost $1.7 billion if bid out in a non-P3 competitive tender.
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The recent fine for admitted fraud is a rounding error in just the profit from this one SNC project alone.
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And we also know that, in building the RAV Line, 10 million cubic meters of polluted urban soils known to contain PCBs were dumped into the Georgia Strait with no independent testing.  PCBs are the second most virulent and persistent carcinogen and are known to bio-accumulate in the Southern Resident Orca population to levels considered many times a fatal dose in humans.
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Criminality left unchecked multiplies boundlessly.  It can now only get worse.
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Randy Chatterjee

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