SAAQclic fiasco: Karl Malenfant had been given permission to view the bids

Karl Malenfant, the person primarily responsible for the SAAQclic project, does not remember being given access to all of the bids for the project.

At the opening of the Gallant Commission hearings on Monday morning in Montreal, his lawyer, Jean-François Bertrand, intervened to argue that his client did indeed have the right to consult a bidder’s tender and that the commission had the documents to prove it.

“What’s the point of being here?”

On the fourth day of testimony from the former vice president of information technology at the Société de l’assurance automobile du Québec (SAAQ), this intervention prompted Commissioner Denis Gallant to call the lawyer to order, as he did not have participant status. The lawyer was indignant, asking, “What’s the point of being here?”

Bertrand’s objective was to counteract the impression left last week when Karl Malenfant claimed that he had never had access to the submissions until the Gallant Commission’s attorney, Alexandre Thériault-Marois, showed him an email he had sent to himself containing one of those submissions. At that point, Malenfant said he did not remember seeing it.

However, the documents cited by Bertrand do indeed exist. They consist of an email exchange in which we learn that Malenfant had obtained authorization from the vice president of finance, Yves Frenette, to consult the calls for tenders, and in which another colleague had given him the link to access them. Malenfant’s response: “Yay, it works.”

No memory

Thériault-Marois criticized him for telling commission investigators during preliminary questioning and the commission itself last week that he had never seen the bids. Malenfant replied that “it would have been much easier for me, knowing that I had the right to do so. I’ll say, well, I had the right, but I don’t remember. I don’t even remember that I had the right. That’s not nothing, after all.”

The way the question was presented last week suggested that Malenfant did not have the right to consult these documents, which shocked Mr. Bertrand. “I saw it all over the newspapers over the weekend. It’s disgusting. He kept highly confidential documents with him, illegally appropriated. That was false; he had the right to have them,” the lawyer railed to reporters during the lunch break, having just had another heated exchange with the commissioner, who had to order him to stop talking and sit down on more than one occasion.

The Gallant Commission is tasked with shedding light on the SAAQ’s failed digital shift. The Auditor General estimates that it will cost at least $1.1 billion by 2027, which is $500 million more than expected.

$222 million shortfall

The questioning of Malenfant continued with numerous details about the contract awarded to the SAP-LGS (IBM) Alliance and the multiple project adjustment requests that kept inflating the bill.

By December 2020, Malenfant knew that he was heading for a shortfall of $222 million on the $458 million contract. Yet, “the money was there,” he stated without flinching, giving the impression that he saw the contract and the SAAQ funds as communicating vessels, until Commissioner Gallant reminded him that no, there was no more money in the contract.

–This report by La Presse Canadienne was translated by CityNews