Part of the problem, the expert committee said in a report, is an unexplained 880,000 extra hours of unapproved overtime since 2009, while the number of procedures carried out remained steady. It also pointed to real estate transactions that sometimes used “hazardous” processes of shifting between numbered companies to get around the necessary authorizations.

Most prominently, the health centre was in the news after Pierre Duhaime, the former head of SNC-Lavalin, the lead contractor for the super hospital, was charged with fraud and conspiracy related to payments that police say are linked to the firm’s winning of the MUHC contract.