Mossack Fonseca front employee signed papers for $22 million bribe

 A GIANT CANADIAN construction company whose reputation has already been muddied by multiple corruption scandals involving foreign contracts has been further exposed  by “The Panama Papers” which  show SNC-Lavalin signed at least six contracts with an offshore corporation whose owner is a secret.

The company’s CEO Bruce Neil acknowledges it as unusual business practice and something his company would never do now reports  the Canadian Press news agency.

SNC-Lavalin paid a secret Caribbean-registered company to intercede on its behalf to obtain hundreds of millions of dollars in business in Algeria, the Panama Papers show, in a similar pattern to how the engineering giant operated in Libya, for which it is facing charges of paying bribes and committing fraud.

Montreal-based SNC landed at least $4 billion incontracts in Algeria during a prosperous decade for the company in North Africa. ThePanama Papers reveal a number of those deals were obtained through the services of a shadowy firm called Cadber Investments SA registered in the British Virgin Islands (BVI) .

The revelations, from a joint investigation by CBC’s French-language service Radio-Canada and the Toronto Star, call into question SNC insiders’ dealings in yet another country, contributing to a mounting toll of evidence that some staff at Canada’s premier engineering firm repeatedly engaged in suspicious commercial practices.

Cadber Investments was set up in 1999 through Mossack Fonseca, the Panamanian law firm that is the source of the massive Panama Papers data leak, and was administered by a Royal Bank of Canada arm in Switzerland, leaked records show, says the CBC (Canadian Broadcasting  Corporation.

However, the true owner behind the company is a secret. All of Cadber’s contracts and correspondence with SNC is signed by the offshore company’s two “nominee” directors — people who worked for Mossack Fonseca and served as fronts for thousands of offshore companies to shield the true owners.

When Cadber Investments needed to formally communicate with SNC or authorize an official document, the Panama Papers show, RBC’s Swiss employees would email the letter or document to Mossack Fonseca, where the nominee directors, based in Panama, would sign it and email it back to Switzerland.

The Radio-Canada/Star investigation found that one of those directors lived in more than modest digs in the countryside 30 kilometers outside Panama City — despite being an official of an offshore company that was in line to receive a total of $22 million in payments from SNC-Lavalin over a four-year period.

The identity of the offshore company’s true owner may soon come to light, though, because RBC indicated earlier this month it will co-operate with a Canada Revenue Agency probe of the Panama Papers and hand over its files on all its clients named in the leak.

Payments to Cadber Investments, to be wired to an RBC branch in Geneva, stemmed from six contracts with SNC from 2000 to 2004 for services as a representative and commercial agent. The contracts covered hundreds of millions in infrastructure deals SNC was seeking in Algeria, including a $750-million contract it obtained to build a water treatment plant in Taksebt.

The contracts are part of the Panama Papers leak and were signed by combinations of three different former executives from the engineering giant’s SNC-Lavalin International unit.