SNC-Lavalin Scandal

Brief Summary of the SNC-Lavalin Scandal - $1.5 million in kickbacks
An investigation reports that $1.5 million deemed as kickbacks ended up in a Swiss bank under the account of former head of the Federal Bridge Corporation, Michael Fournier, according to Radio-Canada. This occurred in the year 2000, right after SNC-Lavalin was awarded with the $125-million contract to refurbish the historic Jacques Cartier Bridge in Montreal (Yauch, 2014).
Two years after the agreement, after construction began on the bridge, a Swiss bank account owned by former Federal Bridge Corporation head, Michael Fournier began receiving frequent payments from Promotag, which was a commercial agency with a close relation to SNC-Lavalin, according to Radio-Canada (Hopper, 2014).
The Swiss account was based in Zurich; it was named “Zorro.” The account had an initial injection of $87,000 from Promotag in January of 2002, following this were eleven more payments that had a peak value of $270,000 from time to time. These payments concluded in 2004, at this point the account reached approximately $1.5 million (Hopper, 2014).
Enquête, a Radio-Canada investigative program visited Fournier’s home 2 months ago regarding the supposed kickbacks he was receiving from Promotag, Fournier had denied the allegations regarding the operating activities that surfaced from the Swiss bank account and he also denied ever collecting money from either SNC-Lavalin or Promotag. However, 1 month prior, Fournier phoned Enquête and explained that he had opened a Swiss bank account for a relative in their family for their use, but had no insight on the operations of the account. The investigation now lies within the hands of the RCMP where further investigation will occur regarding the ...

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2. Hire from external sources, reason being there is no risk taken and no need to consider a conflict of interest with someone working internally. This provides the company with a clean slate of executives who have their morals intact ethically.
3. Emphasis on developing and implementing training initiatives in order to promote the use of ethical conduct with new, young hires. Therefore emphasizing the significance if such a code were to be broken thus addressing the future possibility of a similar scandal.
4. Instead of offering amnesty to whistleblowers for a limited time, we must implement this rule on a permanent basis, and let it be known that it is necessary to report suspicious behavior if noticed without any consequence. The permanent implementation will keep all the employees honest with each other and the company thus minimizing the chance of corruption.