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SNC-Lavalin did not respond to a request for comment.

The World Bank has been stepping up its fraud investigations in recent years, with four times more debarments than in 2012, and compared to the past seven years combined, said Mr. Coleman.

Canadian firms may be at higher risk of being sanctioned by the World Bank, he added, because Canadian authorities have not been as aggressively enforcing its anti-corruption laws as its U.S. counterparts.

“The result of that is that Canadian companies may have been lulled into a false sense of security, because their own national authorities were not closely scrutinizing their global operations, that nobody else would either,” he said.

There were 89 SNC-Lavalin affiliates, however, that were instead given a conditional non-debarment by the World Bank for 10 years. This is essentially a probation of sorts that requires these companies to adhere to compliance standards, but are still allowed to bid on the World Bank’s development projects around the world.

These sanctions were handed down instead of debarment, in part, because these companies had come forward to the bank had demonstrated concrete steps towards anti-corruption practices, said a World Bank spokesperson.

That is a sign that SNC-Lavalin has begun taking compliance more seriously. said Milos Barutciski, Bennett Jones senior partner and co-chair of the firm’s international trade and investment practoce.

“The fact that it didn’t [debar] the whole group is also, I think, an indication of what I believe is that SNC-Lavalin, by the time it resolved the case last spring, had started to take the issues and the investigation seriously. I don’t think SNC’s then leadership, corporate and board, were taking the matter nearly as seriously two years ago.”