Dr. Arthur T. Porter IV Got Very, Very Rich from Ripping off Canadians

Well, yeah, he does kinda look charming.

Arthur Porter MD has been a lot of things over the course of his 58 years. The now-disgraced former head of the McGill University Health Center’s superhospital, Arthur was born in Freetown, Sierra Leone, and achieved some remarkable achievements over the course of a life now threatened by a spreading cancer. His bio is incredibly impressive. Educated in Africa, at Cambridge, Harvard and UofT, he skyrocketed to the top of his industry. A radiation oncologist with articles published in peer-reviewed journals, he sat on numerous advisory boards, established medical programs in Europe, Africa, South America and the Middle East, was an associate professor at the University of Alberta, ran the Detroit Medical Center from 1999 to 2004, and has extensive diamond and gold mining interests in Canada and Sierra Leone.

He also serves or has served as chairman on medical business companies, an American investment management firm, and a private cancer clinic company in the UK. In 2006 he was appointed as a director of Air Canada and became head watchdog over Canada’s spy service, CSIS. All this while he was supposed to be overseeing the construction of Montreal’s long-delayed McGill University Health Centre (MUHC) superhospital, a position he’d taken up in 2004. Talk about multitasking!

Then it all went to shit. In November 2011, Porter resigned from the CSIS watchdog committee when the National Post revealed that he’d been involved in a shady development deal in Sierra Leone involving a Montreal-based former Israeli spy, the Russian government, and his own family holdings in the West African country. A few weeks later, he resigned as the Montreal superhospital’s CEO.

The following year, Quebec’s anti-corruption squad started sniffing around how the $1.3-billion contract to build the MUHC superhospital was awarded to Quebec-based engineering giant SNC-Lavalin—an organization facing its own problems over its involvement with the Gaddafi clan among others. Arthur left the country soon after, destination unknown.

The strange thing about scandals is how they tend to pile one on top of the other, and they all seemed to crash together in November 2012. McGill University announced that it would be suing Arthur for $317,000 over an unpaid loan. A couple of weeks later, anti-corruption agents arrested Pierre Duhaime, SNC’s former chief executive, on fraud, conspiracy to commit fraud, and using forged documents charges that specifically related to the construction of the MUHC’s superhospital.

Duhaime and another top SNC-Lavalin exec are already facing charges relating to another corruption case, and had been fired in March 2012 over two suspicious payments worth a total $56-million. One of those payments—of $22-million—was thought to have been an “irregular payment” in the MUHC case, which appears to be a fancy phrase for “a bribe.” Still, Duhaime got a $5-million golden parachute out of the company, as there hadn’t been evidence of any criminal wrongdoing at the time. Nice work if you can get it.

But where was Arthur? According to La Presse, he was kickin’ it in the Caribbean, running a cancer clinic in Nassau, Bahamas as well as an exotic nightclub and living in an upscale compound with his family in Old Fort Bay. When tracked down by the paper’s Vincent Larouche last October, Arthur was evasive and dismissive, and denied any wrongdoing. He hadn’t been charged with anything, yet.

That changed in late February, when the anti-corruption crew issued an arrest warrant for Arthur, another executive involved in the MUHC project, and a Bahamas-based businessman. He denied any wrongdoing again, but said he can’t return to Canada to answer the charges because of health reasons: he has aggressive, stage-four cancer, and it doesn’t look like he’s faking it. The MUHC, meanwhile, is looking at an eye-popping $115-million deficit.

So the investigation is ongoing. But what’s most baffling isn’t that yet another huge Quebec construction project is mired in controversy, or that a huge Quebec-based multi-national is up to its balls in it. It’s how a guy like Arthur was hired in the first place. According to a Globe and Mail investigation, the dean of medicine at Wayne State University in Michigan warned head hunters in 2003 that Porter had a tendency to stretch himself thin with his various business enterprises. He’d trimmed the Detroit Medical Center down to the bone and reduced staff, but was facing at least two lawsuits from medical companies and a mutiny on the DMC’s board. None of that seemed to deter the MUHC’s hiring committee.

With his girth, his oozing, oily charm, his wealth, countless accomplishments and funny little bowtie, Arthur came across to some as a man to do business with. To others, he was as a master bullshitter. And what better country to come back to for a good soaking than dim, trusting Canada?

Throughout his tenure at the MUHC, board members complained that he was too distracted, too busy to pay proper attention to the project. A reliable donor to the Conservative Party, Arthur was able to buy his way into the party’s good books. And he kept on giving too, even when it was plainly wrong.

So here he was, rubbing shoulders with the rich and powerful, gaining enormous influence among the country’s top power-brokers and enjoying the good life, all while he may very well have been fleecing his adoptive home.

More, he exposed the same rich and powerful group of decision makers at the MUHC and elsewhere as a bunch of gormless suckers who fell for his shtick. Sure, now they’re saying later that they are absolutely shocked by the corruption allegations. But a lot of us aren’t.

Evidently, Arthur was surrounded by an air of untrustworthiness visible to anyone who wasn’t dazzled by his presence or to anyone who simply just cared to look at his history. But a lot of people chose not to size the guy up for who he really was, and look where we are today. Arthur may be facing justice for allegedly getting very, very rich from conning a bunch of idiotic yet powerful Canadians, but the fact that he may not be around long to enjoy his money isn’t a consolation to anybody.

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