Quebec’s Charbonneau Commission investigating corruption in the province’s construction industry didn’t stop at Montreal’s city limits.

Claude Asselin was the general manager for Laval, a city with about 402,000 citizens and 12 miles northwest of Montreal.  The general manager would be roughly equivalent to a city administrator in Idaho.

Asselin, by the way, was arrested by the Sûreté du Québec or SQ, and the Unité Permanente Anticorruption or UPAC, Quebec’s special anti-corruption squad.

According to The Gazette newspaper article headlined Laval manager feared for job, when questioned about his role in the political influence, bid-rigging and kickbacks and asked why he didn’t do something to stop them, Asselin reportedly, “…told the commission Wednesday that he loved Laval and his job as general manager, so he didn’t want to jeopardize that by raising a red flag about the widespread collusion going on between construction companies and politicians”  The Laval Mayor decided which construction companies got the jobs, and Asselin said he was afraid of losing his job if he spoke up.  Hmmm.

The Rochester Democrat & Chronicle newspaper is reporting today that the Federal Bureau of Investigation is investigating the Rochester City School District and some of its contractors in a bid-rigging and kickback scheme.  Some of the underlying details of the alleged frauds committed are outlined in the D&C article.

OpenCdA has put up several posts describing the basis for and workings of Quebec’s Charbonneau Commission looking into the extensive corruption in Quebec’s construction industry.

It will be interesting to follow developments in the FBI’s investigation of the Rochester, New York, school district’s contracting practices.  School districts may be especially vulnerable to the type of fraud alleged in Rochester, because quite often their administrators and patrons just cannot imagine that their community’s predators in the construction industry would take advantage of their gullibility and vulnerability.

Of course to crooks, a dollar is a dollar.  While not all in the construction industry are crooks, some are, and school district boards have a duty to the district’s patrons to safeguard the money entrusted to them.  Board members must remember that their duty is to the district’s patrons and students, not to local industry.

Outside the political boundaries of Idaho, federal agents and federal prosecutors aggressively strive to protect the integrity of our government by investigating and prosecuting bribes and gratuities alleged to have been offered to public officials or solicited or accepted by them.  Here are some examples of public corruption investigations undertaken by the Internal Revenue Service in FY 2013.

Doing its part to educate and inform the public inside the political boundaries of Idaho, OpenCdA will explain what the federal statutes pertaining to bribery and gratuities.   It won’t change the feds’ political cowardice here, but it will help explain why corrupt officials outside Idaho go to jail. (more…)

I seriously doubt that too many of our county and local politicians have even heard of Montreal’s Charbonneau Commission, so its lessons will be missed.   Missed…ignored…same difference.  We are in Idaho, after all.

We provided information about it in our June 18 post titled Another Mayor Arrested – Corruption.

The Charbonneau Commission has remained in the public eye in Quebec largely because of the reporting of diligent news media, especially Montrea’s newspapers The Gazette and The Globe and Mail.  But it would never have launched had it not been for relentless public pressure on Quebec Premier Jean Cherest  to appoint a courageous Quebec Superior Court Justice France Charbonneau to lead the inquiry.

The title of today’s post, though, was a quote taken from The Gazette article on June 21.  That article is a story of how a civil engineer bought public contracts in the local construction industry.  It was a way of life, a cost of doing business, a cost of getting those juicy public contracts for construction and engineering work.  The story notes,

As Quebec continues to delve into the deeply-rooted system of kickbacks, bribes and illegal fundraising that link the province’s construction industry to politicians and civil servants, stories like Raymond’s [the engineer) are becoming increasingly familiar.

The Gazette’s June 21 article is, once again, an excellent tutorial on how municipal corruption happens.  Read it in The Gazette, because these are stories you will never see in the Coeur d’Alene Press or The Spokesman-Review.

Well, yet another mayor pledging to clean up corruption in his city has been arrested — on 14 counts of corruption.  This time it’s Mayor Michael Applebaum, the mayor of Montreal, a city of approximately 1.65 million in Canada’s Quebec province.

According to an O.Canada.com article headlined Development projects at centre of charges against Montreal mayor, “The charges, 14 of which are levelled against Applebaum, who was mayor of the borough [Montreal’s Cote-des-Neiges-Notre-Dame-de-Grace borough] from 2002 to 2012, relate to what officials with Quebec’s anti-corruption squad called ‘tens of thousands of dollars’ in bribes in exchange for municipal support and approval for the two real-estate projects between 2006 and 2011.”

Applebaum and a couple of other suspects were arrested by the Quebec Provincial Police, known there as the Sûreté du Québec or SQ, and the Unité Permanente Anticorruption or UPAC, Quebec’s special anti-corruption squad.  A Globe and Mail online article headlined Behind the bribery allegations that have enveloped Montreal’s mayor provides more details about the charges.

ADDENDUM on June 18, 2013, at 3 p.m.:  Montreal Mayor Michael Applebaum resigned today.  Interesting paragraph from the Reuters article:

His departure will do little to help the reputation of Quebec, where a two-year public inquiry led by Judge France Charbonneau is unearthing almost daily allegations of contract rigging, kickbacks and fraud going back many years.

That is a very succinct and well-stated reason for pursuing public corruption rather than choosing to ignore it.

ADDENDUM on June 19, 2013, at 8:15 a.m.:  Here is a pretty good primer on how to bribe public officials with what appear to be legitimate campaign donations.  Here is another one.