Back when we first began to blog about the depth of corruption at the CRA, our initial introduction from June 2013 contained the following paragraph:
We need an inquiry. Why do some corporations belonging to the wealthiest families pay no tax? Get audited almost every year? (Even though, apparently, very little is ever found). In the past; have offered employment to auditors while those same auditors are auditing their corporations; and no red flags are raised. Even send tugs to warn auditors to back off or else… See letter dated September 6, 2011.
In that paragraph we were referring to Power Corporation (part of the Desmarais Group of companies):
Back in the early 1990’s, an auditor from the Montreal Tax Service Office (TSO), Maurice Fréchette, while in the process of a lengthy audit of the Desmarais group of businesses decided to accept an offered of employment at Power Corporation. This alone should have raised concerns at the CRA, but for some reason no alarm bells went off. What’s even more bizarre is that around the same time Mr. Fréchette was being investigated by the CRA in regards to a scandal which involved him and his brother falsifying R&D claims. Of course the investigation was dropped when along came the employment offer from Power Corp.
Again in that same paragraph from our June 2013 intro: we referred to an incident where a senior auditor in the tax avoidance department of the Montreal TSO was subjected to threats of physical harm when someone went to his home and bluntly told him to stay away from a certain case he was working on. Well we are reporting here today with reasonable certainty (because the auditor would not confirm anything) that the case in question was Power Corp. Once again no action was taken by CRA management. In fact, we suspect that it was CRA management who hired the thugs…
And again the CRA showed their favourable treatment of the Desmarais family in 2011 when they were given a list of Canadian tax cheats whose Swiss bank-account records had been turned over by a whistle-blower and former IT employee of HSC Private Bank in Geneva.
Our fearless leader, Mr. Harper, before the House of Commons vowed to pursue Canadians who are using Swiss bank accounts to avoid paying taxes “to the full extent of the law”; see article below.
Unfortunately for Mr. Harper, the “HSBC” list included the accounts of 2 sons of Paul Desmarais. So rather than investigate and tax the individuals as they had done in most of the case on the list; the audit into the accounts of the Desmarais pair was suddenly called off.
We have to wonder who benefited from the preferential treatment given to the Desmarais’?
Bribery, collusion, and corruption have been all too common at the senior executive level of the Montreal and Ottawa Headquarter offices for too long.
