MONTREAL - Questions are being raised about the city of Montreal's decision to use private investigators to grill a civil servant in 2008 over an alleged phony-billing scheme in the city's computer-systems division rather than leave the matter to police.
As The Gazette reported yesterday, a high-ranking city director wrote to a Surete du Quebec investigator on the case in February 2009 saying the civil servant, Gilles Parent, admitted under questioning by the city's investigators that he made up the involvement of former city executive committee chairperson Frank Zampino in the scheme in order to gain the confidence of a city contractor who was allegedly being told to pay false invoices.
The letter, from city director Pierre Reid, was accompanied by excerpts from a transcript of Parent's interview on Sept. 10, 2008, with two investigators from the firm Navigant Consulting.
Zampino's lawyer, Claude-Armand Sheppard, gave the documents to The Gazette last week. He said Zampino, who quit politics earlier in 2008, gave him the documents. Zampino has never been questioned by the police in the matter, Sheppard said.
Reid's letter and the interview excerpts also say that Parent made up the names of two people he said worked in the mayor's office and the city's legal department and were involved in the alleged scheme.
The city's policy is to launch an internal probe whenever administrative irregularities involving a municipal employee are flagged, but the city contacts the police as soon as any criminal activity seems apparent, city spokesperson Gonzalo Nunez said in an email response to questions from The Gazette yesterday. The city filed a complaint with the SQ on July 4, 2008, he added, two months before Parent's questioning by the private investigators.
"The city does not investigate cases of a criminal nature since that's the job of the police, but as soon as we note the presence of elements of a criminal nature in the case, we transfer the case to the police," Nunez wrote.
The city apparently went farther than its policy in the case, the opposition Projet Montreal party contends.
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