The disgraced former director of a now-defunct native addictions treatment centre near Winnipeg has been sentenced to three years in prison for fraud and bribery.

Perry Fontaine, 55, has also been ordered to pay $1.8 million.

He pleaded guilty in September to the charges and a sentencing hearing was held in December, but it wasn't until Friday morning that his sentence was handed down.

The 76-bed treatment centre, which was located on the Sagkeeng reserve about 145 kilometres northeast of Winnipeg, received millions of dollars in federal funding before being closed in 2000.

During Fontaine's sentencing hearing in December, court was told how he helped set up two phoney consulting firms that received millions of dollars in federal program payments that were supposed to go to the treatment centre. Fontaine personally received $2.36 million.

The scheme ran for nine years until it was discovered in the year 2000. Health Canada cut off the centre's funding in December that year because staff wouldn't co-operate with an audit.

Two other officials sentenced

Patrick Nottingham, Health Canada's former director in Manitoba, was fired after a departmental audit found he had improperly approved $6 million in funding to the centre. He was sentenced in November 2005 to a conditional sentence of two years less a day and ordered to repay $1.14 million.

The Crown prosecutor in that case agreed to a lighter sentence in return Nottingham's testimony against Fontaine, who was director of the Virginia Fontaine Addictions Foundation — which operated the centre — and the alleged ringleader of the scam.

Nottingham was the second Health Canada bureaucrat to plead guilty in the case.

In March 2005, Paul Cochrane, who was an assistant deputy minister with Health Canada at the time of the scam — and head of the First Nations and Inuit Health Branch — was sentenced to a year in jail after pleading guilty to fraud. He admitted that he and his family received more than $200,000 in cash and gifts in exchange for funneling more than $70 million in contracts to the centre.

Cochrane told court during his trial that the kickbacks included nearly $30,000 in travel to Florida and the Caribbean, several SUVs and tens of thousands of dollars in cash, which he used to buy condominiums in Mont Tremblant, Que.

He alleged in court that they came from Fontaine.