Frank Zampino and his co-defendants must stand trial for fraud, breach of trust and corruption in municipal affairs.
The Supreme Court announced on Thursday that it would not hear their challenge to the Court of Appeal’s decision to send the former president of the City of Montreal’s executive committee and his cronies to trial. As is custom when rejecting a request for appeal, the highest court gave no reason for its refusal.
The trial will therefore begin as scheduled on Jan. 15, 2025. Preliminary motions will be heard in the week of Oct. 7, 2024. Four months have been set aside for the trial.
Zampino and five co-defendants were apprehended in September 2017 following an investigation by Quebec’s permanent anti-corruption squad (UPAC), which alleged that Zampino and his alleged accomplices had participated in a scheme to award municipal contracts in exchange for political financing. UPAC and the Director of Criminal and Penal Prosecutions reported some 30 contracts awarded between 2001 and 2009 by Zampino in exchange for payments to the Union Montréal party, then led by Gérald Tremblay, who was mayor of Montréal from 2001 to 2012.
In 2019, Quebec Court Judge Joëlle Roy ordered a stay of proceedings, first for Zampino and then for all the defendants, finding that the wiretap evidence obtained by the investigators on file, including conversations between the defendants and their lawyers, represented a ‘serious violation’ of their rights.
However, last October, a three-judge panel of the Court of Appeal overturned the decision. The panel concluded that “the trial judge relied on erroneous considerations of law and committed manifest and determinative errors of fact, in other words, reviewable errors of fact,” and that “the stay of proceedings should not be granted.”
In its decision, the Court of Appeal acknowledged that the wiretapping violated Zampino’s rights, but ruled that these violations were not sufficiently serious to justify a stay of proceedings. Instead, it ruled that the evidence gathered from the wiretaps could not be used at trial.
At the same time, the Court of Appeal ruled that the other defendants, whose charges had also been stayed, must also stand trial.