John Aquino walks into the Superior Court of Justice Courthouse, in Toronto, on Nov. 12.Christopher Katsarov/The Globe and Mail
The two men facing criminal fraud charges stemming from the $300-million redevelopment of Toronto’s St. Michael’s Hospital secretly worked together to help one of them win the contract, the Crown alleged Tuesday on the first day of the pair’s trial.
Vas Georgiou, the former chief administrative officer of St. Michael’s, and John Aquino, the former president of Bondfield Construction Co. Ltd., are each charged with two counts of fraud over $5,000. They have both pleaded not guilty and the allegations against them have not been proven.
A prosecutor told the court during an opening statement that the trial will hear evidence of the two men’s undisclosed business ties, as well as their undisclosed communications throughout the bidding process for the hospital contract, which Bondfield won in 2015.
“The Crown seeks to prove that they acted as they did in order to increase Bondfield’s chance of success in the competition, and that Mr. Georgiou was willing to do so for Bondfield because of his ties to Mr. Aquino,” Crown counsel Rachel Young told the court.
The defence has not yet given an opening statement or presented evidence.
Mr. Georgiou and Mr. Aquino were each charged in March, 2023. They were also initially charged with one count each of bribery, which is defined in the federal Criminal Code as paying or accepting secret commissions. In February, prosecutors dropped the secret commission charges, acknowledging in court that they could not meet the “high bar” of proof beyond a reasonable doubt.
The allegations against the two men followed a four-year investigation by Ontario’s Serious Fraud Office – a group of police officers and prosecutors launched in 2018 to investigate alleged financial crime.
The case dates back to 2015, when Bondfield, a once-prominent Ontario construction company, was selected as the winning bidder to redevelop St. Michael’s, one of Canada’s premier health care facilities. A series of Globe and Mail stories published in 2015 and 2016 revealed that while Mr. Georgiou was working as one of the evaluators on Bondfield’s bid for the project, he was personally involved in two businesses owned by Mr. Aquino.
Vas Georgiou walks into the Superior Court of Justice Courthouse, in Toronto, on Nov. 12.Christopher Katsarov/The Globe and Mail
After launching an internal investigation, the hospital fired Mr. Georgiou in 2015, alleging his business ties with Mr. Aquino weren’t disclosed.
Since then, the hospital project – which includes a new 17-storey patient care tower and an expanded emergency department – has fallen into disarray and is seven years behind schedule. Bondfield sought bankruptcy protection in 2019, leaving the company’s multinational insurer, Zurich Insurance Co. Ltd., with a financial liability. Several unpaid subcontractors submitted claims to Zurich, which had provided more than $1-billion in guarantees – known as construction surety bonds – on Bondfield’s projects, including St. Michael’s.
Documents later filed in court by Bondfield’s court-appointed monitor say the monitor found evidence in March, 2020, that Mr. Aquino and Mr. Georgiou communicated with each other about the bid during the procurement process. Zurich said in these documents that its investigation found that Mr. Georgiou was given his own bondfield.com e-mail address, bccldevelopment@bondfield.com, and that Mr. Aquino supplied Mr. Georgiou with a secret BlackBerry, which Zurich alleged he used to leak confidential information about the procurement to Mr. Aquino.
Agreed statements of fact filed in court say that Mr. Georgiou was given the bondfield.com e-mail address and a BlackBerry.
“It is further admitted that in the closing days before bids were due, Mr. Georgiou used this e-mail address to communicate with Mr. Aquino,” Ms. Young told the court.
The agreed statements of fact also say that in September, 2015, Mr. Aquino asked Bondfield’s IT staff to permanently wipe all references to Mr. Georgiou from the company’s e-mail server. An estimated 5,000 e-mails were destroyed just days before The Globe published its first story about the business ties between Mr. Georgiou and Mr. Aquino.
Ms. Young said the Crown will tender printouts of the few bccldevelopment@bondfield.com e-mails that still exist, which were found in a folder in Mr. Aquino’s office.
“The issues, as presented by the Crown, will focus on what Mr. Aquino and Mr. Georgiou did, and did not do, when it was not yet known who would win, and why they did it,” Ms. Young said.
She said prosecutors plan to call 30 witnesses, including Mr. Aquino’s brother, Steve; former St. Michael’s chief executive officer Bob Howard; and executives from PCL Construction and EllisDon, the two losing bidders for the hospital project.