Brian Hutchinson: Former spy watchdog

Arthur Porter wanted for alleged

multimillion-dollar fraud

Brian Hutchinson | Feb 28, 2013 12:03 AM ET

More from Brian Hutchinson | @hutchwriter

Allen McInnis / Postmedia News FilesArthur Porter, right, executive director of the MUHC
visits the site of the future super hospital on the Glen Yards with Yanai Elbaz, director of the
redevelopment project, in Montreal on April 17 2008.

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Canada’s former spy watchdog Arthur Porter now a wanted man in Quebec as fraud
probe widens

Arthur Porter, the former federal spy watchdog and chief executive of McGill University’s
hospital network, is now wanted for an alleged multimillion-dollar fraud against the Quebec
government.

The province’s anti-corruption police squad announced Wednesday it is seeking to extradite Dr.
Porter from the Bahamas, where he runs a cancer clinic. He left Canada after resigning from the
McGill University Health Centre (MUHC) and Canada’s Security Intelligence Review
Committee amid scandal in 2011.

The warrant alleges between 2008 and 2011 Dr. Porter and his right-hand-man at the MUHC,
Yanai Elbaz, accepted payments from two senior executives of SNC-Lavalin Group Inc., in
exchange for which the engineering firm was awarded MUHC construction work. In 2010, an
SNC-led consortium landed the contract to build a $1.3-billion MUHC superhospital in west-end
Montreal, one of the richest infrastructure projects in the country.

The SNC executives — Pierre Duhaime, former chief executive officer, and Riadh Ben Aissa,
former head of its global construction business — were charged last fall with fraud and using
forged documents in connection with the hospital contract. They now face a raft of additional
charges tied to the alleged conspiracy with Dr. Porter and Mr. Elbaz.

Continue reading …

Arthur Porter was a one-man charm offensive. Always polite, ever-smiling. Bow tie and dimples.
A quick laugh, but there seemed a nervous edge to it.

“I’m in very sensitive positions,” he told me, in late 2011, back when he was still chairman of
Canada’s Security Intelligence Review Committee (SIRC). “I’d very much not like to be bandied
about in the papers if I could avoid it. Can I?” And that anxious chuckle. “I’d prefer not to look
like an absolute idiot.”

Now police are calling. Dr. Porter is a wanted man. On Wednesday, the oncologist and hospital
administrator whom Prime Minister Stephen Harper had entrusted with Canada’s spy secrets was
formally accused by police in Quebec of defrauding the provincial government, accepting bribes
and conspiracy. The charges relate to a payment or benefit that Dr. Porter allegedly received
while serving as director general of the McGill University Health Centre (MUHC) in Montreal.
His former deputy at MUHC, Yanai Elbaz, faces the same set of charges. And two SNC-Lavalin
Inc. executives who left the engineering giant last year —former chief executive Pierre Duhaime
and former vice-president Riadh Ben Aissa — are charged with offering bribes, fraud, and
conspiracy.
A fifth man, Bahamas resident Jeremy Morris, also faces charges. A source says Mr. Morris was
a Porter associate, and was sometimes seen with the doctor in Montreal.

All of the accused are presumed innocent unless proven guilty.

It’s quite a slip for Dr. Porter, a man who quickly climbed the Canadian establishment ladder.

When we met inside his MUHC office 16 months ago, he still claimed a seat on Air Canada’s
corporate board. It came with nice rewards: A six-figure annual director’s fee, free business class
travel. And a huge stamp of approval. Prestige.

Not that he really needed more. Prime Minister Harper had already made Dr. Porter a lifetime
member of Canada’s Privy Council, requisite to his appointment in 2008 to the SIRC board.

Allen Mcinnis/Postmedia News filesDr. Arthur Porter in 2008 when he was CEO of the McGill
University Health Centre.

Dr. Porter became SIRC chairman two years later, the same month he and Quebec Liberal
leadership candidate Phillippe Couillard registered a private company together. The pair’s
intentions were never made clear.
There were other directorships, and there was Dr. Porter’s main job — or the one he was
expected to perform — as MUHC director general. He accepted the post in 2004, after a
controversial stint at Detroit Medical Center.

Never mind that Dr. Porter had left that establishment as it teetered on the verge of bankruptcy.
That didn’t seem to faze the MUHC’s search committee and its board.

Dr. Porter’s self-described “boss” at the MUHC was David Angus, a Conservative member of
Canada’s Senate. Now retired, Mr. Angus had been chief fundraiser for the Progressive
Conservative party under former leader Brian Mulroney. He had also served as an Air Canada
director before Dr. Porter took his seat there.

“I had nothing to do with his appointment to the board of Air Canada,” Mr. Angus told the
National Post.

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Nor did he have anything to do with Dr. Porter’s appointment at the MUHC. Nor had Mr. Angus
taken seriously a suggestion from Dr. Porter, that Mr. Angus consider becoming consul general
for Sierra Leone in Montreal.

“He did show me, came back one time, you know, I think he even asked if I wanted to be the
consulate, or consul general, in Montreal,” Mr. Angus told the National Post in November 2011.

“I really wasn’t interested and I felt it conflicted with my duties as a senator.”

Mr. Angus has since characterized the offer as a joke and nothing more.

Dr. Porter had other, more prominent contacts. He walked me around his MUHC corner office,
showing off photos of himself posing with some big-time politicians. George W. Bush. Dick
Cheney. Bill Clinton. Stephen Harper, of course.
Brian Hutchinson / National PostArthur Porter's private cancer centre is located inside this multi-
purpose medical facility in Nassau, Bahamas.

He won the job as Canada’s top spy watchdog because, as he put it, he was “good at perhaps
maybe running things … as opposed to just tokenism. I think I’ve been a good chair of it.”

Why, then, did he become involved with a notorious political lobbyist and consultant named Ari
Ben-Menashe? The Iranian-born Montreal resident is a former Israeli spy, so he claims, who now
conducts business with African dictators, among other characters.

Dr. Porter shrugged. He had simply wanted to do some good for Sierra Leone, something that
would “help the development of that poor little African country … I suppose my love for Sierra
Leone and my love for maybe doing something trumped my usual rigour.”

He claimed he had failed to examine Mr. Ben-Menashe’s background before sending him more
than $200,000 from a personal bank account in Florida.

In return for the cash, Mr. Ben-Menashe was to deliver to a company owned by Dr. Porter a
$120-million grant from Russia, to fund infrastructure projects in Sierra Leone.
Brian Hutchinson/National PostAri Ben-Menashe.

Nothing materialized; both sides agree that Mr. Ben-Menashe returned the $200,000. But bad
feelings lingered.

The pair had been introduced by another Porter friend, this one a banker living in Nassau.

Hermann-Josef Hermanns runs the Bahamian branch of Compagnie Bancaire Helvetique (CBH),
a private, Swiss-based bank.

Dr. Porter first told the National Post that he had never heard of such an institution. Then his
story changed. “I didn’t want to talk about [CBH] … until I knew that I did not have a non-
disclosure agreement,” he said cryptically.

A few days later, in November 2011, the National Post published details of the secret business
arrangement into which Dr. Porter had entered with Mr. Ben-Menashe.

Those details — and others Dr. Porter had not wanted mentioned, including his position as
“ambassador plenipotentiary” for Sierra Leone— forced his resignation from SIRC.
There would be other complications, bigger problems. Questions swirled around him in Montreal
and then in the Bahamas, where he moved. More journalists went looking for him.

Last month, I found myself inside a private cancer clinic near downtown Nassau, speaking with
Dr. Porter. He works there now, and lives in a gated beach community.

He smiled and laughed a little. His hands trembled. The next day, he told a local newspaper that
he had just been self-diagnosed with cancer. He said he had no desire, no reason, to return to
Canada.

It appears he may have no choice in the matter.

National Post

bhutchinson@nationalpost.com