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Dr. Arthur Porter has quite a story.
Originally born in Freetown, Sierra-Leone, Porter was educated in Africa and at Cambridge, Harvard and UofT. (University of Transylvania? Texas? Toronto? Timbuktu? Which UofT???) As a radiation oncologist with articles published in peer-reviewed journals, he sat on numerous advisory boards, established medical programs in Europe, Africa, South America and the Middle East, and was an associate professor at the University of Alberta. He amassed extensive diamond and gold mining interests in Canada and Sierra Leone.
He also served as chairman of medical business companies, an American investment management firm, and a private cancer clinic company in the UK. In 2006 he was appointed as a director of Air Canada His resume went on and on and on.
He arrived in Detroit in 1991 as part of the Radiation Oncology team at Wayne State and by 1999 was appointed as the CEO of Detroit Medical Center. When he assumed that position, the struggling hospital system was burning through nearly $100 million a year. Porter slashed thousands of jobs, consolidated hospitals and sold off clinics; but the center continued to lose money and Porter resigned under pressure in 2004. He was succeeded at DMC by former Wayne County Prosecutor Mike Duggan. It was Duggan who stabilized the hospital system’s finances after a $50-million government bailout and is now running for mayor of Detroit.
Despite a stern warning from the Dean of Medicine at Wayne State University, one of Canada’s largest health systems hired Porter inb 2004 to become the executive director of McGill University’s hospital network. Not too long thereafter, plans were developed to build a “Super Hospital” in Montreal, and a committee was formed to oversee the project. Fraud charges eventually arose when committee members allegedly accepted illegal payments from the top executives of the construction firm that had been awarded the $1.3 billion contract to build and maintain the structure.
Porter resigned from the McGill University’s hospital system in November 2011 after the National Post ran an expose of his alleged dealings with a lobbyist to solicit a Russian grant for public projects in Sierra Leone. A subsequent government report discovered mismanagement in the Canadian hospital system, starting about the time Porter arrived, including millions of dollars in unapproved payments.
Interestingly, while residing in Canada, Porter also headed the watchdog committee that monitors the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, the country’s spy agency. (Think FBI … with a Canadian twist.) Appointed to that post in 2008 by Prime Minister Stephen Harper, Porter became chairman of the Security Intelligence Review Committee in 2010.
In 2011, after the mismanagement allegations surfaced, Porter and his wife Pamela moved to the Bahamas and took up residency in the high-priced area of Old Fort Bay. Porter assumed the position of managing director of a private cancer treatment center in Nassau, the islands’ capital. Late in 2012, McGill University filed a lawsuit against Porter for more than $285,000, claiming he failed to fully pay back a $500,000 low-interest loan that the university had given him.
Quebec’s anti-corruption police unit, UPAC, announced the fraud charges in February and has been looking for Porter. At that time he told the Associated Press that he was unable to travel back to Canada because he had stage four cancer. But he obviously did travel to Panama, where he and his wife were arrested by agents of Interpol on the Canadian charges of fraud, conspiracy, breach of trust, taking secret commissions and money laundering. He and his wife were also charged with laundering the proceeds of a crime.