MONTREAL – The Charbonneau Commission broke early for lunch on Tuesday to give lawyers for the city of Montreal and the Quebec Liberal Party time to review evidence that “directly concerns them.”
The drama at the ongoing public inquiry actually began about 24 hours earlier, explained commission lawyer Denis Gallant, who addressed the commissioners just before 11 a.m.
Early in the morning on Monday, someone (it’s not clear who) filed an emergency motion with the commission concerning evidence that was to be presented Tuesday.
Lawyers for the commission and for whoever submitted the motion sat down on Monday evening, Gallant said, and managed to come to an agreement concerning the evidence in question by about 9 p.m.
As a result of that deal, the emergency motion was retracted.
The legal wrangling, however, meant that the city of Montreal and the Quebec Liberals – both of whom apparently have a significant stake in the evidence to be presented – did not get a hold of that evidence until Tuesday morning.
As both parties have been awarded full participatory status at the commission, they have the right to review all evidence before it is made public.
Justice France Charbonneau agreed with Gallant that the city and the Liberals should be given extra time to do just that, and the commission broke for lunch at 11:10 a.m. instead of the usual time – 12:30 p.m.
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The hearings are expected to resume at 2 p.m., when an investigator working for the commission will take the stand to outline the mysterious evidence, thus making it part of the public record.
Earlier in the morning, the commission continued hearing from entrepreneur Piero Di Iorio, who claims he was intimidated and even assaulted when he attempted to bid on public works contracts in Montreal.
Di Iorio, who is currently recovering from heart surgery and working part-time on the Plan Nord development plan, told the commissioners that on a particular contract in 2005, he pushed back hard against another contractor who wanted to win a job in Montreal’s east end.
That contractor, identified as Jean-Guy Ste-Croix, allegedly gave up on trying to convince Di Iorio to back off the contract and offered him a deal. They would both inflate their bids on the project by several hundred thousand dollars, Di Iorio explained, and Ste-Croix would be allowed to win. But after claiming the contract, Ste-Croix would split the work with Di Iorio and they would divide the profits of the collusion in half.
Di Iorio said he expected the scheme would net his company about $350,000.
A third contractor (who was allegedly aware of the scheme), however, decided to best both Ste-Croix and Di Iorio, submitting a much lower bid than both of them and winning the job. Di Iorio said that contractor’s bid contained errors, so the company was eventually disqualified. Ste-Croix got the project as planned, the witness said, but promptly forgot about his deal with Di Iorio.
Di Iorio was furious, he said, and decided he wanted to sue Ste-Croix for the $350,000 he supposedly owed him – but a lawyer advised him to forget about it.
They original deal, after all, was completely illegal.
“He said it would be a bit like calling the police and telling them that someone stole a kilogram of illegal drugs.”
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