SNC-Lavalin engineers admit to copying rival's plans for MUHC

Two SNC-Lavalin engineers admitted at the Charbonneau Commission on Thursday that they copied technical details from plans put forward by a rival firm for their own winning bid for building the MUHC superhospital.

Yves Gauthier and his boss Charles Chebl, the head of SNC-Lavalins construction wing, said they were shown a copy of a competing bid from the Spanish consortium OHL and modified their plans based on what they saw.

Chebl had earlier testified that he received OHLs plans from his boss Riadh Ben Assa, who obtained them from MUHC executive YanaiElbaz.

Chebl said he was pressured byAssa and Pierre Duhaime, the former president of SNC-Lavalin, to modify the SNC-Lavalin bid using OHL's plans.

Assa, Duhaime and Elbazhave all been charged with fraud.

Both Chebl and Gauthier admitted to knowing it was wrong to use OHLs plans to improve their own.

However, they said they did so at the insistence of their superiors.

In Gauthiers case, that was Chebl, he said.

Gauthiersaid he called the provinces anti-corruption unit after hearing other stories of fraud related to the building of theMUHC.

Yesterday, the commission heard thatMUHC officials on the selection committee responsible for evaluating bids for the$1.3-billion hospitalprojectwere trying to disqualify OHL's bid. OHL was the main competitor of Montreal-based engineering firmSNC-Lavalin.