MONTREAL – A Quebec Superior Court judge has ordered Arthur Porter to reimburse McGill University more than $252,000 for failing to fully pay back a low-interest loan as well as a salary overpayment from his duties as a professor.
Justice Jean-Yves Lalonde issued the ruling on Jan. 25 by default, since Porter – the former head of the McGill University Health Centre – never showed up in court to defend himself.
Porter has been living for more than a year in the Bahamas, where he runs a private cancer clinic that he founded. In January, Porter announced that he has inoperable, metastatic lung cancer for which he is undergoing chemotherapy and radiotherapy.
“The plaintiff has proven the essential allegations of its claim,” Lalonde wrote in the two-page ruling, noting that the university provided the court with plenty of documents showing that in 2008 it advanced Porter $500,000 in a “housing loan agreement” that carried one-per-cent annual interest.
The university demanded repayment of the loan in full after Porter resigned as executive director of the MUHC in December 2011, four months before his contract was up, amid concerns that he was involved in too many outside business interests. Porter had also stepped down as head of the country’s spy watchdog after reports of some of his questionable business dealings.
Although Porter did reimburse the university more than $214,000, there was still an outstanding balance of more than $285,000 as of Sept. 30, 2012.
In addition, the university discovered that it had made a salary overpayment to Porter in the gross amount of $50,205, and asked that he pay back the net sum of $30,131. When news of the McGill lawsuit broke, more than a dozen professors in the university’s faculty of medicine told The Gazette that they never saw Porter teach.
In the days following McGill’s legal proceedings in late October 2012, Porter made a payment of more than $65,000 against his debt. However, as of Jan. 22, “despite promises to the contrary, Dr. Porter has failed to make any further payments,” said Albert Caponi, a chartered accountant at McGill, in a sworn affidavit.
The court file includes email exchanges between Porter and McGill officials over the amounts that are due. In one email, dated Oct. 12, Porter disputes some of what he owes.
“I understand the loan, but have received no information on the so-called ‘overpayment’ of any kind.”
He added that he “resides primarily in Sierra Leone.” News reports from the Bahamas throughout 2012 showed that Porter was involved in a number of business projects in Nassau and was, in fact, living in the Caribbean. So far this year, Porter has continued residing in a gated community in Nassau.
On Sept. 18, provincial police investigators carried out a search warrant in the headquarters of the MUHC and left with documents related to the awarding of the $1.3-billion superhospital construction contract.
Investigators also seized during the raid an extensive cache of documents belonging to Porter.
That raid led to the arrest of Pierre Duhaime, former chief executive officer of engineering firm SNC-Lavalin, on fraud charges arising from the superhospital contract.
In January, National Bank filed a motion in Quebec Superior Court claiming that Porter and his wife failed to pay back nearly $800,000 on a mortgage that was due in December. The bank is threatening to seize Porter’s condo on Doctor Penfield Ave. should he fail to pay back the mortgage.
That property has been put up for sale for nearly $1.6 million.
Both Porter and MUHC officials were unavailable for comment.
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