A Toronto engineer is expected to testify that he did more than refurbish theaters for Garth Drabinsky and Myron Gottlieb, when the Crown calls its first witness in the Livent fraud trial on Monday.

Prosecutors intend that Peter Kofman, head of the firm Kofman Engineering, will tell Ontario Superior Court Justice Mary Lou Benotto that he helped Gottlieb conduct a sham invoicing scheme before Livent even came into being.

As part of this week’s opening statement, lead prosecutor Robert Hubbard alleged Kofman, as early as 1990, received invoices from Gottlieb with bogus descriptions of services rendered.

The Crown says Kofman paid the invoices, then billed MyGar, a company jointly run by Drabinsky and Gottlieb after they were forced out of the movie theater chain Cineplex Odeon in 1989. Allegedly, those falsely inflated expenses were then falsely accounted for as assets of MyGar, which was later transferred to Livent before it went public in 1993.

‘If the world had known about the [kickback] scheme at the time of the IPO, there would not have been an IPO,’ Hubbard said in his opening statement.

The alleged kickbacks by Kofman and Gottlieb are also key to the Crown’s chronological presentation of fraud at Livent, with which it intends to build a substantial hurdle for Drabinsky and Gottlieb’s defense team.

In another alleged scheme, Kofman bought in his own name large blocks of tickets to a 1997 Los Angles production of Ragtime to make the show’s box office bigger than it really was.

Drabinsky’s engineer was allegedly reimbursed for his purchases by Livent.

The Crown will assert the box office manipulation was significant because the Ragtime production, which bowed in Toronto before it shifted to Los Angeles, was next bound for Broadway, and Drabinsky and Gottlieb wanted to ensure its success.

Drabinsky and Gottlieb, cofounders of Livent, each pled not guilty to two counts of fraud and one count of forgery as their trial began this week in Toronto.

Drabinsky is being defended by Eddie Greenspan, who also represented Conrad Black during his recent fraud trial. Greenspan is expected to undermine the credibility of the Crown’s witnesses when they begin taking the stand on Monday.

The Crown’s star witnesses include former Livent SVP Gordon Eckstein, former CFO Maria Messina, and Grant Malcolm, Livent’s former senior production controller.

Best known in film and TV circles for launching Cineplex in 1979, Drabinsky recently produced the reality show Triple Sensation for CBC.