Three men, including two former executives with engineering giant SNC Lavalin, have been acquitted of bribery in a massive corruption case involving the building of a bridge in Bangladesh.

Lawyers appeared in front of Superior Court Justice Ian Nordheimer in Toronto on Friday, where Kevin Wallace and Ramesh Shah, former vice-presidents at SNC Lavalin, and Bangladeshi national Zulfiquar Bhuiyan pleaded not guilty to bribery.

The Crown announced they would not be calling any evidence, and asked Nordheimer to order acquittals.

The case revolved around an alleged bribery scheme related to a $2.9-billion development project in Bangladesh. As part of that project to build the Padma Bridge, the Bangladeshi government was looking to award a $50-million construction supervision contract (“CSC”). The World Bank was a primary lender in relation to the project, Nordheimer said.

SNC Lavalin was one of the five companies short-listed for the CSC component of the project. After the company was ranked second in the bidding process, an investigator with the World Bank approached the RCMP in 2011 “concerning allegations that had come to (their) attention regarding possible corruption involving SNC Lavalin and the Padma Bridge project,” Nordheimer wrote.

This included information gleaned from four “tipsters.”

Shah, an Oakville-based employee of the company, was arrested in 2012, and Wallace was charged in 2013. The RCMP also charged Abul Hasan Chowdhury and Zulfiquar Ali Bhuiyan under the Corruption of Foreign Public Officials Act for using their positions to influence the awarding of the contract. Chowdhury was Bangladesh’s former state minister for foreign affairs.

The case effectively collapsed this week after Nordheimer threw out all intercepted private communications from the accused.

He found that the RCMP officer who swore what is known as an Information to obtain (ITO) in 2011 to secure a wiretap had failed to provide adequate information and used language that essentially “tricked” a different judge into signing off on it.

“Reduced to its essentials, the information provided in the ITO was nothing more than speculation, gossip and rumour,” Nordheimer wrote. “Nothing that could fairly be referred to as direct factual evidence, to support the rumour and speculation, was provided or investigated.”

Nordheimer said much of the information came from the “tipsters” the RCMP never actually met themselves, and who were only providing second- or third-hand information. The judge said it’s also unclear if there was even more than one “tipster,” or instead just one or two people using different email accounts.

The “tipsters” did apparently provide names of individuals who they said had first-hand knowledge relating to allegations of corruption, but those people were never contacted, Nordheimer said.

“The information provided by the tipsters was hearsay (or worse) added to other hearsay,” the judge wrote.

Nordheimer also criticized the RCMP for relying on the travel history of the accused to confirm the information from a tipster who said it was at a meeting in Dubai where “the deal for the CSC” had been made. A source had said that Wallace would “definitely be” at the meeting, according to the tipster.

The RCMP indicated in the ITO that they knew the men had been out of the country because police had dates on which they returned to Canada through Pearson airport.

The information the RCMP received on travel history came from the Canada Border Services Agency, which could have also confirmed the travel destinations of the men, Nordheimer said.

Only later did the RCMP ask the CBSA for that information, and it failed to demonstrate that Wallace had been in Dubai at any point in time, yet the RCMP did not include this in subsequent ITOs when it sought to renew the authorizations for the wiretaps, Nordheimer wrote.

“In my view, the only reason for including this travel information in the first ITO was to lead the reader to draw the inference that Wallace was, in fact, in Dubai and thus provide corroboration for an essential allegation made by tipster #2,” Nordheimer wrote.

He goes to say: “This is, in my view, precisely the type of language in an ITO that the Supreme Court of Canada derided . . . that is, language that tricks the reader into believing something, the truth of which is, in fact, unknown.”

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