The Tribune

The unravelling of Dr Arthur Porter’s life didn’t begin in the Bahamas. But it could be considered to have ended here – more or less.

Porter is a leading cancer specialist. He became an international lobbyist, and an advisor to Bahamian, American, Canadian and African political leaders. His business dealings stretched across continents, and heads of state were his colleagues and friends.

He now resides in a Panamanian jail, fighting lung cancer as well as extradition to Canada on charges that he arranged $22.5 million in kickbacks, paid to Bahamian shell companies, during construction of a $1.3 billion hospital in Montreal.

Before his world collapsed three years ago, Porter had been the jet-setting chairman of the Canadian Security Intelligence Review Committee. He had served on a US presidential healthcare commission, had been appointed chairman of the Bahamas Stem Cell Task Force, and was a goodwill ambassador for Sierra Leone, the country of his birth.

“How did I accomplish so much?” he asked in a newly-published memoir on his rise and fall. “By being indispensable and making myself aggressively available. I shook lots of hands and networked on the international circuit ... For me, deal making was truly orgasmic.”

Born in 1956 to a Danish mother and an African father, Porter is a Cambridge-trained radiation oncologist. He moved to Canada in the 1980s, landing top jobs at the Universities of Alberta and Western Ontario.

At 29 he was the youngest department chief at any hospital in Canada, and was soon offered a top post at the Detroit Medical Centre operated by Wayne State University. He created a political storm in Michigan by firing 7,000 employees to stave off bankruptcy.

In his memoir - The Man Behind the Bow Tie, written with former Nassau Guardian business editor Jeff Todd - Porter says he first became associated with the Bahamas in 2000, when thinking about developing a cancer clinic here.

In Detroit he occasionally saw Bahamian patients, “who convinced me to start a practice on the archipelago. I immediately hit it off with Conville Brown and we agreed to go into business together. It was the first such Bahamian clinic to be accredited by the American College of Radiation Oncology.”

While in Canada, Porter was a noted supporter of the Conservative Party, and in Detroit he became a Republican fundraiser and contender for the post of surgeon-general in the Bush administration.

Investing

When he began investing in the Bahamas he naturally became a friend of Perry Christie, whom he described as “a great thinker and an excellent politician (with) one major shortcoming – the inability to make decisions.”

Porter established a family home in Nassau’s Old Fort Bay gated community. And in 2004, McGill University Health Centre recruited him to oversee a multi-billion-dollar redevelopment project in Montreal.

“It was exactly the challenge I was looking for,” Porter said. ”My family stayed in Nassau and I left Montreal on weekends.”

Ground was broken in 2010 on a mega hospital that would be the largest medical facility in Canada, stretching across 43 acres. According to Porter, “building that hospital was probably the hardest deal I had ever closed.”

Engineering giant SNC-Lavalin was one of the bidders on the project. Porter already had ties with this company, which had extensive business dealings with the corrupt Qadaffi regime in Libya. Soon after Porter’s arrival in Montreal, SNC-Lavalin offered him a consultancy job, which he agreed to take after the hospital bidding was over.

“After the groundbreaking,” Porter said, “I started working on a number of projects for SNC-Lavalin, but their activities in Libya cast a dark cloud over everything. Perhaps, like Icarus, I had flown a little too close to the sun, so on November 28, 2011 I resigned. I suppose I did retreat to the Bahamas, but it was not out of guilt.”

In his book, Porter offers a fascinating glimpse of the inner workings of Bahamian high politics. He describes meetings with Christie and Canadian multimillionaire Peter Nygard over Nygard’s demand for immediate government approval of his proposed stem cell institute in return for millions in political contributions during the 2012 election campaign.

“Christie had called me to ask how to handle Nygard. I told him it would not look good for the prime minister to go to Nygard’s home no matter how much money he had donated to the campaign. Christie had pledged to bring stem cell legislation soon after the election. I advised him that stem cell treatment was too important, sensitive and controversial to introduce without careful consideration. It would make or break the country’s reputation as a hub for medical tourism.”

Stem cells

According to Porter, Christie was interested in stem cells for other reasons than economic diversification: “He was something of a hypochondriac and was terrified of heart disease and cancer.” Nygard, on the other hand, “seemed to be borderline fanatical ... My job had been to keep Nygard in check, or at least to try.”

Porter said Nygard wanted to build an institute with himself as chairman that would approve all regulations surrounding the science: “He would be judge, jury and executioner – it would never have worked ... the plan lacked true consideration and common sense.”

So Porter ended up chairing a national task force on stem cell treatment set up by Christie.

He noted that the initiative was almost derailed by op

position attacks over paybacks to Nygard and public controversy over a post-election video in which the fashion mogul said he had “got our country back”.

In December 2012 Porter diagnosed himself with advanced lung cancer, and said he had only months to live. Soon afterwards he learned that Quebec had issued arrest warrants for himself, his wife, Pamela, and top executives of SNC-Lavalin, over an alleged $22.5 million fraud surrounding construction of the Montreal hospital.

Porter was being charged with pulling strings to ensure that the SNC-Lavalin consortium won the job.

“The alleged conspiracy was not only improbable – it was impossible, but not altogether unexpected because I had been targeted for so many things in Montreal,” he said, adding that media reports had cast doubt on his illness and helped fuel the perception that he was hiding out in the Bahamas.

Last May, Porter and his wife flew to Panama on their way to Antigua, ostensibly to discuss a new cancer centre.

Arrested

They were arrested at the airport in Panama City. His wife was extradited to Canada in August, where she awaits trial, while Porter continues to fight extradition from his Panamanian jail cell.

He claims the charges against him are a witch hunt “because of what I have done, and what I know.”

And he does not want to be paraded around as a media spectacle in Montreal, where he would be cast as a villain.

Porter wants to be released on bond to get proper treatment for his cancer: “From there I would fight to return to the Bahamas, and then I would invite the Canadian authorities to come see me, so we could clear up these charges once and for all.”

Meanwhile, the Canadian press reports that SNC-Lavalin “has been reeling from probes into alleged unethical dealings by some of its former employees in Libya, Algeria, Bangladesh and in the contracting process for a new hospital in Montreal.”

Six former employees face criminal charges related to the scandal.

And Canadian police claim to have traced a $22.5 million payment from SNC-Lavalin to Bahamas-based Sierra Asset Management, which they say is a shell company set up in November 2009 by Porter.

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