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Passport fee

By Kevin Steel ⋅ December 26, 2007 ⋅  Email this post ⋅  Print this post ⋅ Post a comment

On the sentencing of Emmanuel Villarceau which happened back on Nov. 20,  the Ottawa Citizen today: Passport fraud lands ex-public servant two-year prison term

"The court documents do not indicate how the people who obtained passports using falsified information came in contact with Mr. Villarceau, nor what Mr. Villarceau received for providing the passports."

Back on May 16, the CBC ran this piece; "Former government worker forged passports" which has these details;

"Villarceau, who worked as an examination officer at the passport office in Gatineau, Que., sold the fake passports between December 2003 and June 2004 to Canadians living overseas, RCMP Sgt. Monique Beauchamp said.

The buyers allegedly paid up to $10,000 for the bogus passport, which bore a false name."

The next day, May 17, the Citizen had this: Passport officer admits to document scam. It contains these soothing words from the RCMP;

"Sgt. Beauchamp said the RCMP has discovered no evidence that the passports have fallen into the hands of known terrorist groups or criminal organizations."

Okay, if the recent story is true and the court documents don’t tell us "what Mr. Villarceau received for providing the passports", and the CBC story is true, that "buyers allegedly paid up to $10,000 for the bogus passport" then somehow that detail didn’t wind up in the court documents. In stories I read, the other detail of how these people "came in contact with Mr. Villarceau" is missing. That is curious and I’m glad the recent Citizen story pointed out it’s missing in the court documents. So who would, or could, blow $10,000 on a false passport? Why would they do that? How did 14 people willing to spend $10,000 on a passport manage to get in contact with this one guy in the main office of Passport Canada-Foreign Affairs and International Trade? (btw just to be clear, the Passport Office changed its name to Passport Canada in Feb. 2005, right around the time Villarceau got caught and was fired–March 2005–probably, you know, to confuse criminals.)