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Dr. Porter was accused by Quebec police in February of accepting illegal payments from two senior SNC-Lavalin executives; in exchange, the company allegedly landed the giant McGill University Hospital Centre (MUHC) project. The new hospital is under construction on Montreal’s west side.

At the time of the alleged fraud, from 2008 to 2011, Dr. Porter was the MUHC’s powerful director general, in charge of one of Canada’s largest health-care providers. He was appointed to the position in 2004, after leading the Detroit Medical Center through a tumultuous period marked by financial difficulties and mass layoffs.

Dr. Porter was a key member of the MUHC’s selection committee that awarded the $1.3-billion hospital construction and maintenance contract to an international consortium led by SNC-Lavalin.

The engineering giant has come under international scrutiny and sanction for other large projects it has landed overseas, in countries such as Libya and Bangladesh. Numerous criminal charges and accusations of fraud and corruption have been made against former SNC-Lavalin executives.

Accused in the still-unfolding MUHC scandal are SNC-Lavalin’s former president and CEO, Pierre Duhaime, and the company’s former executive vice-president in charge of construction, Riadh Ben Aissa, who has been languishing in a Swiss jail for the past year.

Mr. Ben Aissa worked closely with Dr. Porter on the MUHC hospital project once construction commenced in 2010.