Former SNC-Lavalin CEO Pierre Duhaime leaves a courtroom in February 2019, when he pleaded guilty in a bribery scandal around the construction of a $1.3-billion Montreal hospital.
Mar 19th, 2019
Deferred prosecution agreements — the legal mechanism at the heart of the SNC-Lavalin controversy — are not a “get-out-of-jail-free” card, says Sukanya Pillay, a visiting professor and Law Foundation of Ontario Scholar at Windsor Law.
“The raison d'être of Canada’s new DPA law is to fight corporate impunity,” she writes in an article for the Conversation, which publishes news and views from the academic and research community.
“Canada’s DPA regime seeks to avoid lengthy trials and skip ahead to an admission of guilt by the corporation,” notes Pillay. “The court approval safeguard in Canada — not to mention the prerequisite attorney general approval — is aimed at preventing any concerns corporations are flouting the law.”