Lawyer for Katz, Sheegl refutes claims of bribery

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This article was published 01/03/2017 (3171 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The lawyer for Sam Katz and Phil Sheegl said detailed financial records prove that the former mayor and former city chief administrative officer were co-investors with Caspian Construction owner Armik Babakhanians in an Arizona land deal and did not accept a bribe or secret commission from him.

Robert Tapper said he’s speaking publicly in defence of Katz and Sheegl to refute the news stories and the RCMP allegations that portray the long-time friends as criminals.

“What had been alleged by repetition by various media, the repetition of the RCMP allegations, is a very damning thing, to say the former mayor and CAO committed a crime, a bribe, a secret commission,” Tapper said.

“I’ve got three inches of documents in my office. I’ve got all the real estate documents, I’ve got everything. I’ve got the banking histories that demonstrate the payments that exactly tie up to the amounts in the RCMP allegations, to the penny. Timing wise and to the penny… There is a 1,000-per-cent certainty this was a real estate transaction.”

Tapper had first disclosed to the CBC the financial history of what he maintained was a real estate transaction but what the RCMP allege was a $200,000 secret commission paid by Babakhanians to Sheegl, who then shared that money with Katz, to secure the contract for the downtown police headquarters project.

Tapper maintains that the $200,000 payment to Sheegl in July 2011 was a down payment for a share in an Arizona property owned by Sheegl and Katz. Tapper said that Katz and Sheegl had agreed to sell a partial interest to Babakhanians for $327,200. The first payment was made shortly after council gave Sheegl the authority to award the contract for the redevelopment of the former downtown Canada Post warehouse building into the new police headquarters.

A cheque for the remaining $127,200 was paid by Babakhanians to a firm controlled by Katz in 2012 to complete the deal. Tapper said records show Katz then split the sum with Sheegl.

Tapper said he has questions about how the RCMP have conducted their investigation, adding he believes they would have found copies of the documents for the Arizona deal when they seized Caspian Construction records.

“If the RCMP went before a magistrate and said this was a secret commission when they were in possession of this other material, that would be a very interesting thing,” Tapper said. “I’d like to know if they had these documents in their file. If they had these documents in their file, then I will speak to my clients about what, if anything, to be done. But I don’t know at this stage.”

Tapper conceded that Katz, when he was mayor, should not have done the deal with Babakhanians but said it’s not illegal and it is not a breach of the municipal conflict of interest legislation. He also dismissed criticism that Katz, Sheegl and Babakhanians were business partners as a result of the Arizona land deal.

Tapper said the deal made the three men co-investors, not business partners.

“Sam said he had no business dealings with (Babakhanians) and that’s true, he didn’t. He’s a co-investor in a real estate transaction,” Tapper said. “It would come as a huge surprise to many, many hundreds, if not thousands of people in Winnipeg who hold investments in real estate to learn that because they share investments in real estate that are concurrently held by other people that they were in business with those other people…You’re not doing business with them, you’re co-investors. If you speak to anybody in business, that’s what they’re going to tell you.”

aldo.santin@freepress.mb.ca