Peter Nygard and Arthur Porter IV: The Strangest Political Meeting You’ve Never Heard About
Did two Canadian men at the centre of two criminal scandals meet - and know each - other in the Bahamas?
In Canada’s history there are probably few accused criminals as infamous as fashion mogul Peter Nygard and Dr. Arthur Porter IV.
Just weeks ago, Peter Nygard, a billionaire fashion designer who got his start in Winnipeg and built an international brand and reputation, was convicted of four counts of sexual assault in Toronto. Nygard faces further charges in Quebec, Manitoba, and the US. The accusations are extremely serious, and they include grooming, trafficking in and sexually assaulting underage women. They follow decades of rumours, allegations - and the conviction in Ontario is historic.
The late Dr. Arthur Porter IV had different kind of scandals - but still, the kind of that could shake governments. A physician and businessman, of Danish and Sierra Leonean heritage, well-connected to US Republicans and the Harper Conservatives.
On September 3, 2008 - Stephen Harper appointed Porter to be the chair of the Canadian Security Intelligence Review Committee, or SIRC, a sensitive high-security position overseeing Canada’s spy agency, CSIS, and Porter also played a major role in awarding a contract for a hospital project worth more than $1-billion.
Harper appointed Porter to SIRC, despite direct warnings in a letter from Bloc Québécois leader Gilles Duceppe, based on a series major investigative stories in the Quebec media - le Devoir and l’Actualité Medicale.
The warning turned out to be justified.
While Chair of SIRC, Porter donated to the Conservative Party, a relatively minor breach of his obligation to be completely non-partisan – minor, especially compared to his doing business deals with Russia in Sierra Leone, Africa.
In fact, Porter had such standing in Sierra Leone that he had been appointed to be “plenipotentiary” and was authorized to stand in for the head of state.
That meant that, effectively, the head of state of another country - who did deals with Russians - was sitting on the committee overseeing Canada’s spy networks.
For these reasons, in November 2011, Porter had to resign.
Wesley Wark, writing in the National post, said of Porter’s appointment
Ari Ben-Menashe has led an interesting and mysterious life. There is no doubt he has had extraordinary dealings - and not just with Arthur Porter. The hard part is knowing what he’s really done. As Adrian Humphreys, Christopher Nardi wrote.
Ben-Menashe says it collapsed because Porter was just stealing the money. It was embarrassing when the Russians spoke to Sierra Leone’s president, who knew nothing about it.
Ben Menashe claimed that Porter just walked away with the $120-million.
Notably, and perhaps incredibly, that was not the only high-profile scandal involving Porter.
“[Porter] was close to Quebec Premier Philippe Couillard, a relationship that began in 2004 when the politician, a neurosurgeon by training, was provincial health minister. Like many of Dr. Porter's friendships, theirs ended with the news of the hospital's megacost overrun and a $22.5-million fraud inquiry connected to the MUHC's decision to award the construction contract to a consortium led by the Montreal-based engineering firm SNC-Lavalin Group Inc.”
As the National Post reports
During the scandal, someone firebombed Ben-Menashe’s Montreal house. Many assumed a vengeful warlord or spy was behind it. Ben-Menashe claims Quebec police told him a witness was prepared to testify Porter paid to have Ben-Menashe’s house burned to the ground.
It’s surprising, considering the ink spilled on SNC-Lavalin, that the person actually accused of committing the offences at core of the case - Arthur Porter IV - has been set aside.
In between doing a deal with Russians in Sierra Leone while the Chair of SIRC, and taking a $22-million bribe to direct a billion-dollar contract in Quebec, Porter was in the Bahamas, working for the Prime Minister there, as well as running the “Space Nightclub,” described by journalists from La Presse as “one of the sexiest nightclubs in the country. An ad for the bar shows a bare-breasted woman sitting on a giant sack of money, under the slogan, «My bitch bad, looking like a bag of money».
It’s in The Bahamas in 2012 where Porter claims he had an extraordinary meeting with Peter Nygard.
According to Porter’s 2014 memoir “The Man Behind the Bowtie” the two met in 2012 at the Bahamas Sheraton Resort - under remarkable circumstances.
In 2012, there had just been an election in the Bahamas, and Perry Christie of the Progressive Liberal Party (PLP) was the newly elected Prime Minister. Christie appointed Porter to head up a commission studying stem cell regulation. He was also appointed - he claimed - because Christie thought Porter could help handle Nygard.
Porter claims Nygard took credit for getting Christie and his party elected, and impatiently demanded that a bill legalizing stem cell research would be the very first on the government’s agenda. Nygard supposedly wanted to talk about fast-track approval for getting his own stem cell research facility regulated.
A number Nygard’s companies appeared in a number of Offshore leaks - the “Bahamas Leaks” which show companies owned in tax havens. As ICIJ notes, there is nothing necessarily wrong about these incorporations. “There are legitimate uses for offshore companies and trusts. The inclusion of a person or entity in the ICIJ Offshore Leaks Database is not intended to suggest or imply that they have engaged in illegal or improper conduct.”
The stem cell company that Nygard wanted was for therapeutic treatments, supposedly to reduce the effects of aging. One of his companies in the Bahamas was “Nygard Reverse Aging Ltd.”
These are pages from Porter’s memoir - parts of which were quoted in major Canadian newspapers when it came out. (You can buy The Man Behind the Bow Tie here)
“Suddenly, a huge bodyguard opened the door and Prime Minister Perry Christie swept into the room, elegantly attired as always in a formal pinstriped suit. We all rose and he shook our hands. Nygảrd was not interested in ceremony.
"Why do you have me stashed in here, Perry?" he barked.
Christie stepped back. He looked surprised, but quickly recovered with a smile. "Please, everyone, take your seats." Nygảrd returned to his chair but kept both eyes on the prime minister. Christie sat down at the head of the table and released a long breath.
"I have to deliver a speech in one of the conference rooms upstairs," he said softly, apparently answering the question, but not making eye contact with Nygard. He pulled out his cell phone as he spoke, appearing busy and distracted. A few seconds later he took out another phone and placed both on the table in front of him. "So I don't have much time, I'm afraid." He turned to me and smiled.
"How are you, Arthur? Where are we at with things?" I opened my mouth to speak.
"Do you intend on honouring our arrangement?" Nygard blurted out.
Christie raised an eyebrow. "Yes, I do, Peter. But as prime minister of the Commonwealth of the Bahamas..."
"Before the election," Nygard snapped, "we spoke about the stem cell bill being the first piece of legislation before the House of Assembly. Not the third. Not the second. The first. We are a week in, and I have heard nothing. You haven't taken my phone calls. I got a call back from one of your assistants. And now, instead of coming to my house, you have us meeting in some basement. So now I'm here.
You're here. We're all here," he boomed, throwing his hands in the air. "So, please, you tell me, where are we at with things, Perry?"
I immediately knew that the meeting would not last much longer. Earlier that morning, Christie had called to ask my opinion on how to handle Nygảrd. He had been invited to his compound, otherwise known as Nygard Cay.
"You are the prime minister now," I said. "So what if he donated large sums of money to your campaign? It would not look good to go to his home." I recommended he invite Nygard to his office, although clearly Christie opted for a different rendezvous that suited his agenda.
It was May 2012. I had returned to my family's home in Nassau shortly after my resignation from McGill Hospital Health Centre in late 2011. As it turned out, I had plenty to keep me busy there.
The election campaign had ended only a week before.
Christie and the Progressive Liberal Party won by a landslide, a two-thirds majority, over Hubert Ingraham and the ruling Free National Movement. On the day before the election, Christie looked awful. I sat beside him in his living room with a few other supporters. He was slumped on the couch in a yellow PLP shirt, eyes reduced to slits, half-listening to the last-minute advice being fired at him from all angles. Morale was low. Most people did not think he would win, let alone by a comfortable margin.”
Porter wrote that Nygard came back with a proposal that would basically allow him free rein to do whatever kind of stem cell research he wanted.
Porter wrote:
“My job had been to keep Nygärd in check, or at least try. But following the election, Christie had purposely distanced himself. He knew that the legislation could not happen as quickly as Nygard wanted. Cutting him off, however, completely thwarted Nygard's need for contact and first-hand information. This explained why he was so upset that day at the Sheraton.
Christie assured him that the government was working on it. And the two agreed that Nygard would present a formal paper on the creation of stem cell therapy in the Bahamas. When I received it a few days later, it was abundantly clear, in my view, that Nygard was dreaming.
The paper proposed a plan and accompanying legislation that had been attempted by one of his friends in California many years before, without success. The proposal was to build an institute and form a board of directors that would approve any regulations surrounding the science, with
Nygard, of course, as its chairman. He would be judge, jury and executioner. It never could have worked.
First off, such a deal would make the prime minister look as if he was completely bending to Nygard's will. There were questions of power and sovereignty for the Bahamas.
Meanwhile, the clinic would be performing anything but routine treatments. The success or failure of stem cell therapy in the Bahamas hinged on balancing innovation with patient care. Without that balance, you risk quackery.
In my opinion, Nygard was less concerned about the universal healthcare benefits and more focused on how he could extend and improve his own life.
The plan lacked true consideration and a common sense approach. Christie agreed with me, and asked me to commission a set of lawyers to craft a government paper on establishing stem cell clinics. The process would take time, a commodity that Nygard hated losing more than anything.
The fashion mogul started courting other statesmen with his proposal for a research and treatment facility.”
Nygard eventually got fed up with delays in the Bahamas and pursued the project in St Kitts.
However, around the same time as the meeting, Nygard made a video featuring himself and Bahamian politicians he took credit for getting elected. The video leaked and created a huge controversy in the Bahamas.
Media reports and investigations that followed later suggested that Nygard had donated about $5-million to the PLP party. The Bahamas Tribune reported that Nygard signed an affidavit admitting that he was a supporter of the PLP.
A class action lawsuit in New York has scans of the cancelled cheques to Bahamanian politicians or their family members from Nygard’s business accounts. That lawsuit alleges that “In the months leading up to the general election of May 2012, many politicians visited Nygard Cay to receive cash for their campaigns,” though the allegations have not been proven in court.
The payments on the scanned cheques from Nygard Holdings Ltd were to Eric Gibson, the brother of PLP Minister Shane Gibson. The cheques are dated in 2011 and 2012.
The large cheque at the top of this image for $6,000 to Eric Gibson, is dated February 6, 2012.
According to Porter, the meeting in the Sheraton wasn’t the first time he and Nygard had met. Porter had lived in the Bahamas for years, had visited Nygard’s estate and said he travelled on Nygard’s jet, surrounded by “models.”
As people say, “There’s a lot to unpack” about the meeting between Nygard, Porter, and the Prime Minister of the Bahamas.
You have Porter – who was at the very centre of the SNC-Lavalin corruption scandal in Quebec, doing deals with Russia in while overseeing Canada’s spy agencies as Chairman of SIRC - all while being the “plenipotentiary” of Sierra Leone.
Until he was convicted for the first time, Nygard, a billionaire with a track record of being able to somehow, always get what he wanted.
It’s also no accident that Porter fled from the Bahamas to Panama - where he was finally arrested on a warrant from Interpol. The Bahamas and Panama are both notorious tax havens that have been used for hiding money, as the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) reported.
The Bahamas is “on a par with Panama in terms of its thirst for and tolerance of dirty money,”
In 2014, the most recent review of the Bahamas’ anti-money laundering systems by the OECD faulted the country on half of the core measures used to judge countries’ compliance with international standards. This included no requirement for banks or financial institutions to know the real identity of a company or trust owner. Although the OECD now considers the Bahamas compliant, in June 2015, the European Union listed the Bahamas and 30 other countries as uncooperative tax havens.
Nicholas Shaxson, author of Treasure Islands: Tax Havens and the Men Who Stole the World, said the Bahamas is one of the handful of tax havens with a riskier and wilder reputation than bigger offshore jurisdictions such as Switzerland.
The Bahamas is “on a par with Panama in terms of its thirst for and tolerance of dirty money,” said Shaxson.
Recently, Shaxson said, as governments push tax havens to share banking and financial information with national tax agencies concerned about offshore evasion by citizens, the Bahamas has pushed back.
“They are saying ‘While everyone else is being transparent, your secrets are safe with us,’” said Shaxson. “Bahamas has also long taken an attitude of selective noncompliance with its own laws, and it is now pushing out this message with a nudge, nudge, wink, wink.”
Canadians have been debating “Election interference” in our own elections - but this is an instance of a Canadian billionaire taking credit for winning a national election in another country. This does raise bigger questions about democracy and the rule of law, not just for the Bahamas, but for Canada.
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