A Toronto judge found two men guilty in the St. Michael’s Hospital fraud case today
Vas Georgiou and John Aquino were convicted of fraud over $5,000
A verdict has been reached in the fraud case against a former chief administrative officer at Toronto’s St. Michael’s Hospital and the ex-president of Bondfield Construction, a major Ontario construction company.
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This morning, Vas Georgiou and John Aquino received guilty verdicts on two counts each of fraud over $5,000. A Toronto judge found that Georgiou had shared privileged information with Aquino to bolster the bidding process for the hospital’s $300-million expansion, which Bondfield won in 2015.
“That conduct would be recognized as objectively dishonest in any circumstances, but when seen in the context of a strictly regulated public procurement, it is unmistakable,” said Superior Court Justice Peter Bawden, according to a CBC report.
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A lawyer representing Georgiou declined to comment while his client awaits sentencing.
Aquino, on the other hand, did not hold back. To a CBC reporter who asked if he had anything to say about the verdict, he responded, “Are you fucking kidding?"
Carly Lewis is a journalist whose work has appeared in the New York Times and the New York Times Magazine, Vanity Fair, Wired, Interview Magazine, Pitchfork, Elle, and Maclean’s, where she is a contributing editor. Her work has been recognized by the National Magazine Awards and the Digital Publishing Awards. She reports on city life, culture—including what people do online—politics, art and crime. She received the Dave Greber Freelance Writers Award for “The Murder of Ashley Wadsworth,” an investigative feature about a Canadian teenager who was killed by a man she met on social media, published by Maclean’s.
