The former boss of Sutton Quebec was sentenced Wednesday to five years in prison for arson. He will have to pay $1.5 million to his victims.
Posted at 4:03 p.m.
“I plead guilty,” José Christophe Folla, 71, had just declared twice, by teleconference from Saint-Jérôme prison.
He faced a series of accusations: of setting fires to competitors' homes between 2017 and 2022, and of plotting to set other fires, until his arrest in January 2024.
The judge immediately pronounced his sentence, negotiated during facilitation sessions between the prosecution and the defense.
The court also took into account a settlement of two million made in the context of a civil suit from the insurer Promutuel, which claimed sums from it to compensate for the damage it caused.
Vengeance
Folla sponsored the series of disasters with two accomplices, Benjamin Amar and Alain-Marc Nahmias, also accused.
With the exception of a fire started by mistake in the wrong place, all these crimes targeted former partners who joined the competition, Christian Bouvrette and François Léger, then the succession of the latter after his death, in 2022.
The buildings in question housed branches of Royal LePage Humania which they owned. The two men worked with Sutton Quebec until 2017, before changing affiliations, and Folla would not have digested it.
The arsons would have started just after, in September 2017, according to the police report.
More details to come
