Montreal Mayor makes bizarre statement when son charged with laundering $1 billion in drug money

[ftr23532]

So while reading up on the extradition of Victor "http://www.usatoday.com/money/perfi/funds/2003-10-02-omega-kozeny_x.htm">The Pirate of Prague" Kozeny, and how that relates to http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=125x129611">the use of purchased passports by the uber-wealthy to avoid extradition, I http://www.jonesbahamas.com/?c=45&a=10884">stumbled across the money-laundering case of Dominion Investment involving the laundering of about $1 billion in drug-trafficking proceeds and various other frauds. There are some interesting twists. Here's an http://www.cbc.ca/canada/montreal/story/2006/01/25/qc-launder20060124.html">overview:

Quebecer accused of laundering millions
Last Updated: Wednesday, January 25, 2006 | 9:55 AM ET
CBC News

American law enforcement officials are accusing a Quebec man of laundering hundreds of millions of dollars.

Drug enforcement officials say Martin Tremblay, 43, laundered amounts of money that would rival the operations of some Colombian drug cartels.

Officers had been keeping an eye on Tremblay and his company Dominion Investments for nearly three years.

The man, from Quebec's Saguenay region, may have been laundering money for longer than those three years, said special agent Christopher Giovino of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration.

"He is charged with taking in illicit moneys from narcotics or stock fraud or tax evasion, and changing over that money into other funds by wire transfers," Giovino said Tuesday.

Giovino alleges Tremblay would then deposit that money, once laundered, into special accounts for his customers.

Investigators allege Tremblay would collect a commission for his efforts, and that the Quebecer laundered as much as $1 billion.
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Radio-Canada is reporting that Tremblay not only ran a brokerage house in the Bahamas, but was also the head of a Swiss bank in Nassau.

In addition to heading up the Dominion Investment brokerage house since 1994, Tremblay also ran the Nassau branch of Ferrier Lullin since 2005, Radio-Canada reports. Ferrier Lullin is one of the most important Swiss banks in Bahamas' capital city.

Tremblay is being held in a federal facility in New York. He is scheduled to make a court appearance within a week.

If found guilty, he could face a maximum of 20 years in prison and a financial penalty of $1 billion.

So the guy that ran a brokerage that rivaled Colombian drug cartels in its money-laudnering activities also happened to run the Bahamas branch of the Swiss bank Ferrier Lullin. And we should note that, Ferrier Lullin was a subsidiary of Swiss banking giant USB before it was http://www.marketwatch.com/news/story/story.aspx?guid=%7BDBC3EA2A%2D462E%2D430B%2DA434%2DE0BD6F3A0DA2%7D&dist=rss">sold to another Swiss bank, Julius Baer, in September of 2005. So we're talking about the manager of a major Swiss bank's branch in the Bahamas, one of the offshore financial capitals of the world, laundering about a $1 billion over a few years. If that seems surprising, http://fortherecordessays.blogspot.com/2006/11/part-10-look-at-world-of-money_11.html">it shouldn't.

Now let's take a look at this http://cnews.canoe.ca/CNEWS/Canada/2006/11/20/2431361-cp.html">November 20, 2006 article on how the case was resolved:

November 20, 2006
Quebecer pleads guilty to laundering in N.Y.
By NATHANIAL GRONEWOLD

NEW YORK (CP) - A Quebec investment banker pleaded guilty in U.S. federal court on Monday to one count of laundering illicit proceeds from drug trafficking.

In a plea agreement reached with prosecutors, Martin Tremblay of Saguenay, Que. admitted he agreed to launder US$220,000 in illicit funds on behalf of federal agents he believed were drug runners. The actual charge he pleaded guilty to is for only the $20,000 he received in New York, as his lawyers argued that he was unaware of a further transfer of $200,000 to accounts in the Bahamas.

In exchange, the U.S. government agreed to dismiss the more serious charge of laundering $1 billion in profits from narcotics trafficking and a host of other illicit activities.

Appearing in court in his grey prison uniform and testifying under oath, Tremblay confessed to Judge John Keenan that in March 2005 he met with individuals in New York who requested his assistance in hiding the source of drug profits.

He further admitted that in May 2005 he received a wire transfer of $20,000 to an account in New York with the intention of laundering the money through various means.

"I knew it was wrong," Tremblay told the judge.

In the plea agreement reached with federal prosecutors, the government will recommend a prison sentence of 70 to 87 months - five years and 10 months to seven years and three months - and a further fine of between $12,500 and $125,000.

...

Tremblay is the former president and managing director of Dominion Investments. A graduate of the University of Western Ontario, Tremblay is 44 years old. He is divorced with three children, ages 14, 13 and 2.

So as part of the plea agreement, he admits to laundering $20,000, the government charges him with an additional $200,000, and the rest of the $1 billion in laundered money charges gets dropped. That sure is nice of them and, once again, http://fortherecordessays.blogspot.com/2006/11/part-10-look-at-world-of-money_11.html">not particularly surprising.

Now here's where things take an interesting twist. The article mentions that Tremblay is divorced with three children, but they leave out a rather important familiar connection: Martin Tremblay appears to be the son of Montreal's mayor, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%A9rald_Tremblay">Gerald Tremblay. While it was pretty difficult to find this connection in print anywhere, here it is...http://www.info690.com/nouvelle-tremblay_plaide_coupable_blanchiment-38358-2.html">in French. So let's look at a Babblefish translation of a press release by Gerald Tremblay the day after Martin Tremblay pled guilty to laundering the money:

Photograph: photos.com
National | Tuesday Nov 21,2006 | 08:16
Tremblay pleads guilty with bleaching: his/her father defends it

New York (PC) - Saguenéen Martin Tremblay, which pled guilty, Monday, in front of a court of New York, with a reduced charge to have bleached 20.000 $US coming from the traffic of drug, was a victim of the American justice which had needs to find a culprit.

It is what his/her father claims, Gerard Tremblay, who expresses himself by way of official statement, Tuesday morning.

The father of the businessman affirms that the pressure that his/her son underwent and that its poor conditions of imprisonment were right of him, just like the distance of his family. He did not have any more the physical and moral force to fight to prepare a possible lawsuit, according to his father.

Gerard Tremblay denounces also the work of American lawyers of M.Tremblay of which the goal, affirms it, was to negotiate with the public ministry and to make believe in Martin Tremblay that never Québécois would not have the favour of the jury in a business of money bleaching to a court located at two steps of Ground Zero.

Gerard Tremblay, who is convinced of the innocence of his son, does not believe that a jury made up the people potentially traumatized by the events of the September 11,2001 can be neutral.

In return of a plea of culpability on a largely reduced charge, the continuation agreed to give up the other charges which made carry the total account of the sum présumément bleached to more than 1 billion $US.

...

Now, an accurate translation would be helpful here, but it appears that Montreal's mayor is charging US authorities with setting his son up, and claims that a jury from New York City would be too traumatized due to the horrors of 9/11 to be neutral.

Like I said, it's an interesting case.

[whistle]

1. Or, he could be saying that trial so far away from his sphere of

...influence would be hard to fix!

[cdnwannabe]

2. Ok, let's not rely on a Babelfish translation here....

they can be extemely inaccurate and in many cases miss the meaning of what is said completely. Remember, another language doesn't have to make sense when translated to english, that is what translators are paid to do.

That being said, it would be difficult to misinterpret that Tremblay is saying his son is being set-up. Given the atmosphere in this country nowadays, I would not be at all surprised.

[ftr23532]

3. Yeah, I'm hoping someone who knows French will help us out here

I also wish I knew more about Canadian politics and had a sense of who Tremblay's political enemies might be. I wonder how his relations are with Harper's government?

I'm still amazed at how little attention this angle of the Dominion story appears to have received even in Canada's press. I feel like I'm reading about a Neil Bush scandal.

[cdnwannabe]

4. Given that Quebec, among other things, wants to have its own

voice in the international community (one recent example being the row over the Kyoto protocol) I would say that any relationship between a Quebec politician and Harper's government would be tenuous at best. But I'm thinking more on the federal/provincial level as opposed to local.

[ftr23532]

5. Ok, my stupid mistake...this is a different Gerard Tremblay

My bad, this is was a case of stupidly mistaken identity. The lesson here: Don't drink and google. The Gerard Tremplay, who is the father of Martin Tremblay, is a former Quebec businessman man that apparently fled the the Bahamas with his family after selling his cable business back in 1994 to the Videotron, Quebec's primary cable provider. And from what I can tell, Gerald Tremblay (also some spelled 'Gerard Tremblay'), the mayor of Montreal, actually seems like a pretty decent politician too. But this story of Dominion Investments is still pretty interesting and intersect the weird side of Canada's politics in a number of ways (including the Hells Angels).

So, according to http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=fr&u=http://www.cyberpresse.ca/article/20061121/CPACTUALITES/611210427/5276/CPACTUALITES&sa=X&oi=translate&resnum=1&ct=result&prev=/search%3Fq%3D%2522Danielle%2BVaillancourt%2522%2Btremblay%26hl%3Den%26lr%3D%26safe%3Doff%26sa%3DG">an interview of Martin Tremblay's mom, the entire investigation into her son is a conspiracy by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police(RCMP), so the parents of Martin Termblay aren't solely pointing the finger at US authorities here.

Now let's take a look at this article on the history of Gerard Tremblay's fortune, which appears to include http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucien_Bouchard">Lucien Brouchard, a prominent Canadian politician and Quebec Nationalist. Here's the http://66.218.71.231/language/translation/translatedPage2.php?lp=fr_en&urltext=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.cyberpresse.ca%2Farticle%2F20060515%2FCPACTUALITES%2F605150470%26SearchID%3D73244725160870">translated article:

Monday May 15, 2006
MULTIMILLIONNAIRE OF THE CABLE

Gerard Tremblay shows audacity

Louis Tremblay

The Daily newspaper

Chicoutimi

May 10, 1994, the multimillionnaire of the câblodistribution Gerard Tremblay and the members of his family give up behind them them statute of Canadian citizen residing and their country.

They cross a few hours later the customs of the Bahamas to put at the shelter Canadian tax department the fruit of the sale of Télésag by a series of financial transactions offshore oil rig which forward by Bermuda.

That to which André Chagnon de Vidéotron offered a gold mine of 33,5 million dollars to put the hand on a network of 40 000 subscribers to the Saguenay-Lake-Saint-Jean in A surprised more one by this other financial operation. It wanted to benefit fully from its success and especially, to save the 7 to 8 million taxes on the capital gain which it should normally have paid with the ministries provincial and federal income.

...

Birth of an empire

At the beginning of the years 1970, the Council of broadcasting and Canadian telecommunications (CRTC) publish invitations to tender for the interested groups to obtain licences in order to develop the industry of the câblodistribution. The office of genius council Tremblay Rinfret Tremblay draws well its pin in the construction industry from public infrastructures, but the adventure of the cable draws the attention of associated the Gerard Tremblay, Gilles Rinfret and Pierre Tremblay, the brother of Gerard.

The engineers decide to form a company with the businessman and financial Jean-Louis Gauthier (today deceased) which made fortune in the petroleum products and which appreciates the entrepreneurial character of Gerard Tremblay.

The new group retains the services of a rising star of the right to Saguenay, the lawyer Lucien Bouchard, to convince the police chiefs of the CRTC of the solidity of the project of Télésag.

The audiences proceed in Montreal in April 1974. June 14 of the same year, the CRTC grants the licence to Télésag Inc.

Less than two years later, the financier Jean-Louis Gauthier, which had brought to the group the financial guarantee in front of the CRTC, calls upon the clause "shot gun" of the convention of shareholders to buy the shares of the three engineers. Gerard Tremblay smells already the seam and manages to make the financial arrangement to reverse the vapor and to repurchase the partner of the departure in spite of the important capital that the construction of the network of cable mobilizes.

Whereas the interest rates explode and that the company reaches always the stage of the development, a hard conflict of work bursts and will mortgage Télésag seriously.

"In 1980, a loan of 500 000$ with interest rates to 15 %, it was money. At the end of the conflict, Télésag did not even have the liquidities to pay its lawyer Lucien Bouchard. Gerard Tremblay offered actions to him."

But Lucien Bouchard refused, explains a source very quite informed. "I think that Lucien had to regret it a little thereafter", this one continues.
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