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It was that decision the company sought to overturn at the Federal Court; it also wanted Roussel to beordered to invite SNC to the table.

SNC had been lobbying for DPAs to be brought to Canada since 2015, just months after the company was charged by the RCMP with bribing a foreign public official (under the Corruption of Foreign Public Officials Act) and fraud (under the Criminal Code of Canada) and a few months before the Trudeau government was elected.

The great advantage of DPAs to troubled companies is that it spares them the possibility of a criminal conviction and thus the potential of being “debarred” from applying for getting lucrative federal government work.

The RCMP alleges that between 2001 and 2011, SNC-Lavalin and two of its wholly owned subsidiaries paid almost $48 million to Libyan public officials to influence government decisions on contracts.

Happily enough for SNC, the government held consultations in late 2017 and the following year quietly introduced the necessary Criminal Code amendments at the bottom of a huge budget implementation bill.

Photo by Sean Kilpatrick/The Canadian Press/File

Unhappily for SNC, the legislation specifically says that where a company is alleged to have breached the Corruption of Foreign Officials Act, as SNC is, “the prosecutor is not to consider the national economic interest” in making her decision.