Macleans: Andrew Coyne

It depends on what the meaning of the words "bank account" is

Andrew Coyne — Fri, 21 Dec 2007 11:09:44 -0500

Mulroney's 1996 testimony (transcripts: day one and day two) is hugely entertaining in other ways, not least in light of his belated admissions before the Commons ethics committee.

The 1996 Mulroney, for example, was greatly indignant at the suggestion that he had a Swiss bank account. Over and over he repeated:

I don't have a bank account in Switzerland. I don't have a bank account in any foreign country in the world. I never have.

After his ethics committee appearance, that absolute, unequivocal denial should carry this asterisk: *Except for a safety deposit box in New York City, where I kept $75,000 in cash.

The 1996 Mulroney was equally outraged that the RCMP, before approaching the Swiss authorities, had not first interviewed him. Had they done so, he said, he would have given them his full cooperation, in a way that would have put their concerns to rest. Over and over, he repeated: he would have answered all their questions, opened his books, given them everything they needed.

Would you like to examine my documents? Would you like to examine my bank accounts?
I had to file my income tax returns like everybody else. He could have had my income tax returns.
Anything that you need from me, from bank accounts to ... to tax returns to whatever, I will give everything I have.

At the time, Mulroney would have known, though his listeners did not, not only that he had been paid a large sum of cash by Karlheinz Schreiber, but that neither his bank accounts nor his tax returns showed it. By his own admission, he had never deposited the money in any account (or not the kind that keeps records -- see above), nor did he report the money on his taxes until 1999.

The letter of request was to gain access to Schreiber's Swiss bank accounts. The money Mulroney was paid was drawn from one of those accounts. Had the police accepted Mulroney's offer of "cooperation," they would have known nothing of this.

All this, on top of his well-known -- and spectacular -- evasions with regard to his relationship with Schreiber. "We would have a cup of coffee, I think, once or twice... I think I had one in the Queen Elizabeth hotel with him... I had never had any dealings with him."

What is perhaps less well known is this exchange, at the very end of the first day, in which Mulroney describes that "cup of coffee" at the Queen Elizabeth.

Q. But the.., so I... perhaps I misunderstood. When you talked about having coffee with Mr. Schreiber at the Queen Elizabeth, it was in the period subsequent to November nineteen ninety-five (1995)?
A. No. No, it was after I left office in nineteen ninety-three (1993), and that's when he told me, as I indicated to you, that, that he was dismayed that my Government had not allowed him to proceed with his desire to build this Thyssen Project. And that's when he told me that he had hired Marc Lalonde to represent him, because he figured that Mr. Lalonde could prevail upon Mr. Chrétien and the Government to have this done in the East end of Montreal. Which, by the way, had they been able to do it, I... I... I thought it was a good project, and so I wouldn't have been critical of anything.
He told me he hired Mr. Lalonde to do that, he told me he was contemplating legal action against my Government, that he had hired a prominent law firm in Ottawa, I think Ian Scott's law firm, very distinguished lawyer, to take action against the, the bureaucrats in my Government who, he alleged, had frustrated the fact that he was never able to get a deal through. This deal. That was the kind of conversation we had.
Q. M'hm.
A. He expressed the hope that Mr. Lalonde would be successful in persuading the new Liberal Government to agree to conditions that would enable him to proceed with the project. That was it.

Emphasis added. That was it. Not: And then he pulled out an envelope stuffed with $75,000 in cash and handed it to me. Not: This was in December 1993, the second of three such meetings in which Schreiber handed over envelopes full of cash to me. Not: But why am I talking about Lalonde? Schreiber hired me to represent the same project overseas.

Clintonian is hardly the word.

Old friends who never met

Andrew Coyne — Wed, 19 Dec 2007 21:12:14 -0500

Just going over the last time Mulroney testified -- well, I was going to say under oath, but this time he really was: at his 1996 deposition prior to his libel suit against the government of Canada. The testimony is notable for the number of things the former prime minister did not know or could not recall:

- He had "no specific recollection" of his first meeting with Schreiber, though he could say it was "in a business context" (he told the ethics committee it was "through the political process")

- He didn't remember whether it was in Alberta or Quebec

- He had "no idea" whether he was a political contributor

- He did not know of any relationship between Schreiber and Airbus ("not at all") nor did he know of any commission sales agreement between them ("never").

- He did not know that Schreiber was a friend of Franz Josef Strauss, although he said he read it later.

Talking of Strauss, what Mulroney did not know about Schreiber paled in comparison to what he did not know about Strauss. "I did not know Strauss myself," Mulroney said, "nor did I know any of his family." Mind you, "I knew of Franz Josef Strauss," but "I didn't know him personally. I never met him."

What did he know of him, then? Well, not that he was chairman of Airbus, that's for certain ("no idea"), although he knew that he was premier of Bavaria, and had been minister of Finance in the Federal Republic of Germany.

But met him? Never. Didn't know him. Nor any of his family. What are we to make, then, of this recollection of happier times from Pat MacAdam, Mulroney's longtime aide, in a recent newspaper column?

I remember the first time Karlheinz and Brian Mulroney met in 1984. The office of Brian's longtime secretary, Ginette Pilotte, was on one side of Mulroney's office and mine was the other bookend. We were the "gatekeepers."
Max Strauss, the son of Bavarian premier Franz Josef Strauss, paid a courtesy visit. Brian and the senior Strauss were old friends. Karlheinz Schreiber, who was unexpected, accompanied Max.

Emphasis added. Could Pat's memory be playing tricks on him? Getting on a bit, isn't he? Except here he is saying the same thing on CBC Television in the fall of 1999.

"I met him [Schreiber] when he used to call on Mulroney. He was looking after the Franz Josef Strauss interests. The father, Franz Josef, was a good friend of Mulroney's in years gone by. The son used to call on him as a courtesy call. I was the gatekeeper then, and kept the appointments, and he'd come in with Max Strauss ... oh, maybe five, six, seven times a year."

Good friends? Six or seven times a year? How could MacAdam be so mistaken? Or has he not had time to read Mulroney's testimony?

"Proceed in this manner."

Andrew Coyne — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 21:55:14 -0500

The Chair: Good morning, gentlemen.
Mr. Mulroney, I expect that you will recall the rules, procedures, and traditions of the House of Commons. In particular, you will recall the general expectation that witnesses appearing before the committees testify in a truthful and complete manner.
We could proceed on this understanding; or alternatively, would you feel more comfortable being formally sworn in by the clerk of the committee?
Right Honourable Brian Mulroney (P.C., As an Individual): Proceed in this manner.
The Chair: Thank you.

The closer you look at this Mulroney business, the crazier his story looks. I've taken a first stab at unwrapping it. But several loose ends remain. For instance:

Mulroney says that, contrary to Schreiber's testimony, the two men never discussed doing business together until their August 1993 meeting at a hotel near Mirabel airport, where Schreiber, after a few preliminary pleasantries about suing the government of Canada, suddenly produced $75,000 in cash and offered him employment.

The money, as we now know, came from the Britan account Schreiber maintained in a Swiss bank, stocked the previous month with $500,000 out of the millions in secret commissions he received, most of it from the sale of Airbus planes to Air Canada. Bank records show that Schreiber withdrew $100,000 on July 27.

If we believe the former prime minister, then, Schreiber deposited the money into the Britan account, withdrew the cash, and brought it all the way across the Atlantic with him (are you allowed to bring that much cash into Canada?), just on the off chance that Mulroney might be willing to work for him -- that is, before they had ever discussed it. It's possible. But is it probable?

Mulroney's deputy prime minister is among those who are finding it hard to suppress their doubts about his testimony. Which raises this question: Why wasn't Mulroney sworn in? The chairman had the option of requiring him to do so, and Mulroney had the option of agreeing to, but neither chose to exercise their respective options. Inside the Queensway's incomparable Lady K walks us through the implications. Upshot: Mulroney faces much less severe penalties if he's found to have lied to the committee than Schreiber would.

Does Mulroney take us for fools?

Andrew Coyne — Fri, 14 Dec 2007 03:21:31 -0500

So, after all this time -- four years since it became public knowledge that he took cash payments from Karlheinz Schreiber, fourteen years after the actual event -- Brian Mulroney finally comes forward to explain... and explains nothing. Or rather, digs himself deeper. Those who might have been inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt until now will have a harder time of it after the preposterous story he told the ethics committee today.

Let’s get a few things straight off the top. There are three sets of events about which we need answers. The first has to do with the circumstances surrounding the payments in cash Mulroney admits to having taken from Schreiber after he was prime minister, that is from 1993 on: what he did for the money, why he took it in cash, why there are no records of it anywhere, why he went to such elaborate lengths to conceal it, and so on.

The second has to do with a number of contracts for government business for which Schreiber was paid millions of dollars in secret commissions by his German clients in the 1980s -- not only Airbus, but Thyssen and MBB: how those contracts were won, and what Schreiber did with the money, and whether the first had anything to do with the second. In particular, there is the question of Schreiber’s relationship, financial or otherwise, with several members of that group of Tories centred around Mulroney, going back to the days of the 1983 convention.

Each of those is significant, and troubling, in itself. They remain so, quite apart from whether anyone can connect the two -- that is, whether the payments that we know Mulroney received from Schreiber after he was prime minister were in consequence of anything he did for him while he was prime minister. This third scenario is the one that gets everyone excited. It is, to be sure, the most significant question, in the sense that if it were true, it would be the most serious possible outcome.

But it is also the one for which there is the least evidence. None, in fact. Moreover, both men have consistently denied there was any such exchange (though, it should be said, this is hardly surprising: if there were such a link, they would hardly, either of them, be anxious to admit it). But in fact no evidence has been produced to suggest Mulroney personally took bribes from Schreiber, either before or after he left office. It has not even been alleged, except in the infamous 1995 letter of request to the Swiss authorities.

But we do not have to leap all the way to prime ministers taking kickbacks to want the first two sets of events explained. And this Mulroney signally failed to do. He did not give convincing explanations for events of which he was a part in the 1980s. And he most certainly did not give a convincing account of his dealings with Schreiber after he was prime minister.

Instead, he spent most of his time attacking Schreiber’s credibility. This would be significant, and useful, if the business truly pitted one man’s word against the other’s. But in fact that is not the case.

Schreiber’s credibility would be the central issue in this case if we did not know that Mulroney took hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash from him. But we do. His credibility would be the issue if we did not have his bank records, or the agreements he signed with Airbus, Thyssen and MBB -- but we do. We can trust our own eyes. We don’t need to trust him. We know from these records that Schreiber was paid millions, and we know where at least some of it went: to Frank Moores and his partners in Government Consultants International, and to Brian Mulroney.

To be told that Schreiber is a liar and a perjurer does nothing to explain why Mulroney took cash from Schreiber after he left office, or any of the rest of the story. It is, for the most part, beside the point. To be sure, it would be interesting to know whether they agreed to do business together before or after Mulroney stepped down as prime minister. But the relationship between them is troubling either way. It’s troubling even if you accept Mulroney’s version on every issue on which they disagree. All Mulroney needed to do was explain his side of it. And this is the story he told us:

He said he was hired in August of 1993 to promote the famous Bear Head project to build light-armoured vehicles in Cape Breton -- not in Canada, as Schreiber alleges (which would not only have been in contravention of the lobbyist regulations, inasmuch as he was not registered to lobby, but would also have have run afoul of the code of conduct for public office holders) but overseas: that is, to sell the vehicles abroad. There was no factory to build them, you understand, depending as the project was on government financing that had not proved forthcoming. But never mind. What could be more innocent: selling Canadian-made vehicles -- peacekeeping vehicles, no less -- to other countries?

Why, then, have we not heard this story until now? Mulroney has had seven years to tell his side of the story, ever since his dealings with Schreiber were first unearthed by the reporter Phil Matthias, and since Matthias told what he knew to Bill Kaplan, the lawyer and historian who eventually broke the story. Kaplan spent more than two years nailing it down. In that time, he talked to Mulroney probably dozens of times. The former prime minister tried every possible tack to persuade him not to publish the story, sounding at times a pleading note, at other times a threatening one. In all that time, he never once disclosed this wonderfully exculpatory version of events. Nor has he or any of his spokesmen breathed a word of it since. Why? Maybe he was embarrassed about the cash? That would explain why he didn’t tell anyone before these became known. But after? What’s to lose?

I think we should hear more. Who did he talk to on these foreign journeys? According to Mulroney, he talked to Boris Yeltsin, and to Francois Mitterrand. Does he have any other names -- someone living, perhaps? He says he talked to government officials in China and the United States? Are there any records of these meetings?

Then there’s the little matter of the cash. According to Mulroney, it was Schreiber who insisted that he be paid in cash, in payments totalling, he says, $225,000, not the $300,000 Schreiber has maintained. Schreiber’s explanation for this extraordinary request, he says, was simple that he was an international businessman, and this was how he did business. O-kay. That does not explain why Mulroney -- former prime minister of Canada, former president of the Iron Ore Co. of Canada, experienced lawyer -- accepted the request. All that we heard, over and over, was: I made a mistake. It was an error. I’m sorry.

This at least has the virtue of being something we have heard before. A month ago, Mulroney’s faithful former spokesman, Luc Lavoie, road-tested the international businessman-colossal mistake explanation. But Luc added another element: Mulroney needed money. Desperately. This was a rare point of agreement between Mulroney and Schreiber, who said the same thing in his testimony. Indeed, Mulroney once confided in Kaplan to much the same effect. “I can tell you,” he said in a June 4, 1998 interview, “when I first started out, I needed … money quite badly.”

But this was a hard sell -- not only did he have most of his expenses paid as prime minister, on top of his six-figure salary, on top of his pension, but the party also kicked in $4000 a month to boot -- and in any event, if he was so broke on leaving office, it was hardly likely to be more than a temporary affliction. He was a former prime minister, with business connections the world over; soon, he would be joining oin the blue-chip Montreal law firm of Ogilvy Renault. Why could he not have hit up a friend, Peter Munk for example, to tide him over until the directorships and legal fees started to flow? Or a bank? Or Ogilvy Renault? Why go to Schreiber? And why in such circumstances. Perhaps that is why Luc is no longer his spokesman.

So: ixnay on the overtypay. Stick with “colossal mistake”. Is this credible? Suppose it is. Stretch your mind around the notion of a man of Mulroney’s stature meekly acceding to Schreiber’s request. Maybe he was startled, temporarily flummoxed at the sight of all that cash, reluctant to give offense. It happens. But three times? Over sixteen months? By that time, you’ve presumably recovered your composure, not to say your common sense. And still you take the cash? Nobody does business this way. Nobody in business does, that is.

Even then, suppose that’s true. That still doesn’t explain why Mulroney himself kept no records of the transaction, or any subsequent disposition of the cash. Maybe Schreiber didn’t want to leave a paper trail. Why did that prevent Mulroney from leaving one? Yet not only is there no invoice, no contract, no receipt, nothing to link the two men in any way, but there is no record of what Mulroney did with the money at any point thereafter. No bank statements: he didn’t deposit the money in any bank account, he says, but rather in a safe, at his home in Montreal, and in a safety deposit box in New York. And no expense records: he can offer no receipts or records to account for how the money was spent, though he says it was used strictly for business expenses incurred in the course of representing Schreiber’s interests abroad, and though he says he paid for these with a credit card (paying off the credit card bill in turn with wads of cash). And this brings us to the tale of the taxes.

Mulroney did not pay tax on the $225,000 he says he received in 1993 and 1994 until 1999, when he made what’s called a “voluntary disclosure.” He filed tax returns for those years, but did not mention the payments he received from Schreiber. He says he only finally decided to pay taxes on the money because Schreiber’s 1999 arrest on charges of fraud, bribery and tax evasion in his native Germany convinced him that Schreiber was not the respectable businessman he had imagined him to be. Why that should have been the determining factor the committee did not explore.

But Mulroney says he was not obliged to pay tax on the income he received from Schreiber, because it was not really income, as such, but merely a kind of expense account for him to draw down as need be. O-kay. Did he keep any records of his expenses? Oh yes. Where are they, then? Did he submit them to the tax department, when he finally did file? No: He paid taxes on the whole amount, claimed no deduction for the $40,000 in expenses he says he incurred. Again, this had something to do with Schreiber’s arrest, though again the link is unclear. But what is clear is that this relieved him of the need to file any supporting receipts. But then what about those records he says he kept? Oh, he destroyed them once the tax matter was cleared up. Of course.

Does he take us for fools? No cheques, no invoices, no receipts, no contracts, no bank statements, no withdrawal slips, no credit card bills, no expense records, nothing: not a single scrap of paper exists, it appears, anywhere in the world to support Mulroney’s version. Well, there might be: his tax records. In order to make a voluntary disclosure, you have to make a full explanation of everything to do with the income: how you earned it, what you did with it, etc. Is there a letter to the tax department somewhere offering such explanation? Apparently not. What about his income tax returns, then? Can we at least see them? Uh-uh, he said: those are private. I say again: Does he take us for fools?

All of these questions, all of these doubts, as I said before, are raised not by anything Schreiber said, but by Mulroney’s own testimony. But then, nothing Mulroney said today made much sense. He is still insisting that he barely knew Schreiber -- against a mountain of letter, visits, photos, and telegrams going back to the early 1980s -- and that, so far as he knew him, he was merely a hard-driving business man, the head of Thyssen’s Canadian subsidiary, a man of accomplishment, employer of 3,000 souls. It was only with his arrest in 1999, apparently, that the scales fell from his eyes -- though by that time Schreiber had been a fugitive from German justice for four years.

If so, Mulroney was perhaps the last person in Canada to harbour such illlusions. John Crosbie, Peter MacKay, Rhys Eyton, Paul Tellier, Robert Fowler and Peter Lougheed are among the major political, bureaucratic and business figures who have said they had misgivings about him, or indeed refused to have anything to do with him. Public inquiry? Schreiber has already been the subject of one -- 26 years ago, in 1981, over a notorious purchase of land outside Edmonton, Alberta, one that had uncannily anticipated a provincial land-use decision, which may or may have had something to do with the several former provincial cabinet ministers Schreiber had taken into his employ. Of all this Mulroney was blissfully unaware.

Likewise, he continues to maintain that his statements under oath prior to his 1996 libel trial -- to the effect that he had never had any dealings with Schreiber -- were the literal truth, if you interpret “never had any dealings” to mean “never had any dealings involving the exchange of Airbus contracts for cash.” No one but he can know for sure what was in his mind at the time, but I defy anyone reading the statement in its original context to discover that interpretation. Understand: the letter of request was seeking access to the Britan account -- the very account from which Mulroney was, in fact, paid (notwithstanding his bizarre attempt to deny this in front of the committee).

Even more dubious is Mulroney’s imputation of the same selective interpretation to Schreiber’s Edmonton lawyer, Bobby Hladun. Asked about the call he is alleged to have made to Hladun in 1999, asking Schreiber to sign a document asserting he had never paid Mulroney any money for any purpose -- a call Hladun described in a letter to Schreiber’s other lawyer, Eddie Greenspan -- Mulroney insisted that Hladun, too, had meant by this, or had understood Mulroney to mean, that Schreiber had never paid him any money in connection with the Airbus contract.

But if that were true, why would Schreiber refuse to sign? Why would Greenspan, as Schreiber has testified, forbid him to sign (it would be interesting to hear Greenspan on this -- no solicitor-client privilege can exist on a matter that the client has already disclosed). Mulroney was, by his own account, asking him to do nothing more than tell the truth -- a truth that he, Schreiber, had already confirmed publicly any number of times. So why wouldn’t he?

On and on it goes. At times, Mulroney seemed genuinely confused as to the facts, claiming that Government Consultants International, the notorious lobby firm at the centre of this whole affair, did not yet exist when he appointed Frank Moores, its chairman, to the board of Air Canada (in fact, it had been incorporated two months before) -- this, though Moores was lobbying for Airbus at the time. Mulroney even claimed that Schreiber had disavowed any involvement in financing the airlift of 450 delegates from Quebec to Winnipeg to vote against Joe Clark at the 1983 Conservative leadership review, when Schreiber has in fact affirmed his invovement on numerous occasions, most recently in his appearance before the committee on Tuesday.

Mulroney had no convincing explanation for either event. Nor could he explain why, after Schreiber sent him a letter in May of this year accusing him of all sorts of misdeeds and threatening to expose him if he did not help him on his extradition case -- the “blackmail letter,” Mulroney called it -- he did not immediately turn it over to the police. Or why Elmer MacKay would have drafted Schreiber’s letter to him of the previous year. His testimony is, quite literally, incredible.

And on those rare occasions when he was pinned down, when the illogic of his position was pursued to its logical conclusion, when all the spin and bafflegab had been worn away, leaving only the stark inexpicabilty of Mulroney’s behaviour, he fell back on his handy, all-purpose, non-explanation: it was an error of judgement. I made a mistake.

But that’s not an explanation. It’s at best a description. It tells us nothing about his motives, reasoning, or objectives. It merely categorizes the result. It tells us neither why nor how he did it, but merely that he did it, and if he admits he was wrong to do so now, he gives us no indication why he did not see it that way then, or what has happened since to change his mind -- still less why he went to such great lengths to conceal his initial error.

In any case, that’s not an error. It’s a pattern.

Questions someone really ought to ask Mulroney

Andrew Coyne — Wed, 12 Dec 2007 17:34:35 -0500

I was going to post a list of suggested questions for tomorrow's ethics commitee hearing, but this cat beat me to it. It's pretty comprehensive.

ERRATA: Aside from putting CGI for GCI throughout, I can see only one clear error in the piece -- in question 4b, where it is stated that GCI had a commision sales agreement iwth Airbus. So far as I am aware, the only such agreement was with International Aircraft Leasing, Schreiber's Liechtenstein-based shell company. Schreiber then paid Moores via a complicated chain of bank transfers.

As for omissions, if I think of any other pertinent questions I'll post them.

Schreiber Day 4 highlights

Andrew Coyne — Wed, 12 Dec 2007 16:44:46 -0500

Karlheinz Schreiber’s fourth day of testimony before the Commons ethics committee was the usual farrago of teases, evasions, dropped questions, loose ends and general confusion. In all that, the Bavarian greasemonkey did leave the committee with a few leads to pursue. Highlights:

- He readily confessed to having bought the 1983 Tory convention that toppled Joe Clark from the leadership, in concert with Franz Josef Strauss (the Bavarian premier and chairman of Airbus Industrie at the time) and “maybe the Christian Social Union,” the party Strauss led and sister party to the ruling Christian Democratic Union. Schreiber talked of personally contributing $25,000, but it's clear that much more money was spent than that.

For example, Schreiber and Strauss together bought a piece of property worth $369,000 from Frank Moores as a way of funneling money into the dump-Clark movement. Mulroney's Quebec people flew almost 200 delegates to Winnipeg (out of a total of 2400 at the convention) on two jets leased from Wardair, together with $56,000 to pay their registration fees and, according to Schreiber, some spending money for their wives. L. Ian MacDonald, Mulroney's former speechwriter, has written in his official biography of the former PM that the operation cost a quarter of a million dollars -- in cash.

- Mulroney not only had "dealings" with him after he was prime minister, Schreiber said, and not only at the famous Harrington Lake meeting (which may have taken place before or after the June 25 resignation date -- Schreiber has said both), but three months earlier, at a meeting with Mulroney and Elmer MacKay at 24 Sussex Drive, where Schreiber pitched the Bear Head project yet again -- the one Mulroney allegedly killed in 1990, after first ordering his chief of staff to "get this done."

- Schreiber said he told Mulroney at the time he paid him the $300,000 that the money came from the $4-million in "success fees" he was paid by Thyssen after it appeared the federal cabinet had given the project the go-ahead -- an understanding in principle signed in September of 1988 by three cabinet ministers. This seems dubious: the money came out of an account set up to hold all of his secret commissions, including both Airbus and Thyssen money.

- He repeated his charge that the RCMP never interviewed him between the time that Der Spiegel first reported on his involvement in the Airbus deal in 1995 and the settlement with Mulroney in January 1997. The force had last week issued a textbook non-denial denial, insisting that it had interviewed Schreiber several times -- between 2000 and 2006. Which is interesting, given that the Mounties formally discontinued the investigation in 2003.

- Schreiber at one point said Mulroney offered to finance his lawsuit against the government of Canada in Alberta. The case, in which Schreiber alleges the government and the RCMP abused their authority in their dealings with him, is significant for having first raised the notion that the RCMP were working with a confidential informant on the case -- who turned out to be none other than Stevie Cameron.

- Mulroney was allegedly present at a meeting where the alleged scheme to divide the spoils of government business with GCI was discussed. According to Schreiber:

It was agreed upon -- at least what Mr. Moores told me already in the eighties -- that GCI would look after Mr. Mulroney, and that when Mr. Mulroney is no longer the Prime Minister, he would work with GCI...
This is what my understanding was from Frank Moores, and especially from Gary Ouellet, and when all this was discussed at the beginning - that GCI would do the business and get the lobbying business in all this - this was in the eighties. The discussion was one day in the Ritz-Carlton, and Mr. Mulroney was present.

It's not clear from this whether Schreiber himself was also in attendance.

- Schreiber dropped the name of Benoit Bouchard, Transport minister from 1986 to 1988, as someone the commitee might want to interview, both with respect to Airbus and Bear Head. He coyly declined to offer further details.

- And then this incredible (possibly literally) passage:

I met quite often with Claude Taylor [Air Canada's chairman in the 1980s] and I didn't mention it but I was then approached [by] other members of the board from Air Canada ... who wanted just $400,000 from me or I would never get the Airbus contract done.

Never mind the $400,000 -- what was he meeting with Claude Taylor about? At the time, no one knew that Schreiber had any involvement in the Airbus deal -- certainly not that he was being paid commissions on it, since these were prohibited. So what would he and Taylor have had to talk about?

In other news, Schreiber could not name the lawyer in Geneva to whom Fred Doucet allegedly asked him to transfer money. He denied being the one who leaked the infamous letter of request to the Swiss authorities that formed the basis of Mulroney's lawsuit against the government. And he denied discussing a deal with the RCMP in which he would agree to offer information in return for being allowed to stay in Canada.

Comme Drudge, developing...

Questions someone really ought to ask Schreiber

Andrew Coyne — Tue, 11 Dec 2007 09:38:45 -0500

Today is Karlheinz Schreiber’s fourth and possibly final day of testimony before the Commons Ethics Committee. Perhaps members of the committee will get around to asking the following...

1. You have claimed to have contributed $25,000 to Brian Mulroney’s leadership campaign as long ago as 1976. Is there any record of this? If not, why not? Was it in cash? Was the candidate aware of your contribution? Did you discuss it with him personally? Was he the only candidate you contributed to? Why did he merit your support? What did you hope to gain by it?
2. In the late 1970s, you hired or otherwise sponsored a number of ministers in the Alberta provincial government, current and former, including a loan of $150,000 to the late Hugh Horner, then the deputy minister, that was never fully paid back. What were your objectives in this? Was the sale of Airbus aircraft to Pacific Western Airlines, then government-owned, one of them?
3. During a 1981 public inquiry into your land dealings in the Edmonton area, in which you allegedly profited, via your connections, from cabinet confidences, you said you saw nothing wrong with hiring former cabinet ministers to advance your interests with the governments in which they had just served. Indeed you said you planned to hire “more cabinet ministers in the near future from other provinces.” Which other former cabinet ministers did you hire?
4. In 1982, you invested, along with Franz Josef Strauss, the premier of Bavaria and chairman of Airbus Industrie, $369,000 in a Newfoundland property owned by Frank Moores, the former premier of Newfoundland and fundraiser for a group of Mulroney supporters who were seeking to unseat the Conservative leader, Joe Clark. What was that money used for?
5. Describe your involvement in paying for anti-Clark delegates from Quebec to attend the leadership review conference in Winnipeg in 1983. Why did you do this? Was Mr. Mulroney aware of your assistance? When did he learn of it?
6. Did you contribute to Mr. Mulroney’s leadership campaign in 1983? Did you contribute to his own or the party’s campaign in 1984? If so, how much and in what form -- cash or other? Is there any record of this? Was Mr. Mulroney aware of it?
7. Describe how the Airbus deal worked. Why did Airbus agree to pay commissions to your company, International Aircraft Leasing, on the sale of planes to Air Canada, when the payment of such commissions was prohibited under the terms of the contract? Why did Airbus need your help? What services were you expected to perform? What services did you perform? What was Frank Moores’s involvement in the deal?
8. The same questions, with regard to the sale of helicopters to the Coast Guard, for which you were secretly paid commissions by Messerschmidt-Bolkow-Bohm.
9. The same questions, with regard to the funding of the Bear Head project to build light armoured vehicles in Canada, for which you were secretly paid a “success fee” by Thyssen Industrie.
10. Your bank records indicate that you were paid nearly $20-million in commissions on the Airbus deal, $4-million on the Bear Head project, and $1-million on the helicopter deal. What did you do with the money? How much went to Frank Moores and his company Government Consultants International? Where did the rest of it go? Your bank records indicate half of it was distributed in Canada. Your German lawyer has testified in Canadian court that it was used to pay Canadians. Who?
11. In 1999, you were a fugitive from German justice, living in Switzerland. You are a Canadian citizen. You are worth millions. Why, then, did Elmer MacKay come all the way to Switzerland to bring you to Canada? Why did he buy your airline ticket? Is the timing, one day after the arrest of two Thyssen Industrie executives with whom you had conspired to bribe German politicians, a coincidence?
12. After your arrest in Canada in 1999, Marc Lalonde and Elmer MacKay each agreed to put up $100,000 to bail you out of jail. On your release, you made this statement in front of the television cameras: “It is, I think, a great pleasure to have friends. I have always had friends in my life. And I will never let a friend down. So they came here to get me out. I will never do anything to harm them.” What did you mean by that last sentence?

Der skandalnamenkontest

Andrew Coyne — Mon, 03 Dec 2007 09:54:21 -0500

Thanks to everyone who took up my challenge to Name that Scandal. Most of your suggestions were awful, but then most of mine were as well. A few, however, were distinguished by their adequacy.

A large group were variants on Air- something-or-other: Aircash, Airgraft, Airbags, etc. Of these, I think the best were Airbust (contributed by an anonymous entrant) and Airbucks (anotheranonymous entrant).

A second group was built on the sturdy Schreiber- chassis: Schreiberola, Schreiberfreude, etc. Of these, the most euphonious were Schreibergelder(Joan Tintor) and Schreiberbriber (Canada Goose).

A third group suffered from too much cleverness, at the expense of clarity: for example, Brieber, orLeaderhoser. If you have to explain it every time, it's not going to work. Pay Comeau, the Hotel Lobby, and the Pasta-Fee Catastrophe display something of the same affliction, while being too specific to cover the many facets of this affair -- though I admit to a certain fondness for the Pasta Disasta.

Yet another group was not nearly clever enough, being but variants of the dreary -gate or -scam conventions:Airgate, Schreibergate, Bribescam, etc. It was the purpose of this competition to avoid such dullardry. An honourable discharge, however, to the impeccably Germanic incomprehensibility ofswinetroughschreiblerooneywermachten-
riddleunterleafienscandalaliebchengate.

So, unless I hear prolonged squawking, I'm going to put four nominations up for you to vote on: Airbucks, Airbust, Schreiberbriber and Schreibergelder. (Yes, I will allow write-in candidates.) These get at the essential elements of this complex business -- Schreiber, Airbus and money -- without unduly narrowing its scope.

Bear in mind as you vote the need for ease of use: we want this to enter the language, which can only happen if it's quick, catchy and rolls easily off the tongue. Imagine it as it would appear in a sentence: "The xxxx affair took a fresh turn today when..." or "the key to understanding xxxx is..."

Now vote.

Like father, unlike son?

Andrew Coyne — Mon, 03 Dec 2007 09:34:38 -0500

Peter MacKay is telling reporters he warned his dad, Elmer, to steer clear of Karlheinz Schreiber, of whom he said he was "leery." He said he had held this opinion for "a number of years."

That period would seem to have begun sometime after 1992, when the younger MacKay was employed for some months by Thyssen Industries, one of the companies Schreiber was then representing, in this case on the infamous Bear Head project to build light armoured vehicles -- in Nova Scotia, as it happens.

MacKay says at the time he "had no idea who Mr. Schreiber was or what his association was with Thyssen." So how did he get the job then?

Other questions: when did the younger MacKay first become aware of who Schreiber was? When did he become "leery" of him, and why? And why did his father ignore his warnings?

UPDATE: Luc Lavoie has signed off as Mulroney's spokesman. This is a shocker. Luc was with Mulroney from the very beginning of his travails, twelve long years ago -- about a quarter of the $2.1-million settlement was paid to Luc for his services -- but now, now, he doesn't have enough time for the job?

BACKDATE: It is, recall, the elder MacKay to whom we owe the pleasure of Schreiber's presence in this country. After Schreiber fled his native Germany, a warrant for his arrest outstanding, and one day after the arrest, in May 1999, of two executives at Thyssen with whom he had conspired to bribe German political figures -- this time in connection with a scheme to sell German tanks to Saudi Arabia -- it was MacKay senior who flew over to Switzerland to bring him back to Canada. He even bought him his ticket.

This incident has always been a bit of a puzzle. Why did Schreiber need MacKay to come and get him? Schreiber is a Canadian citizen. He's worth millions. Why couldn't he buy his own ticket?

And of course it was MacKay, along with Marc Lalonde, who bailed Schreiber out when he was arrested later that year, each posting $100,000 to assure the courts he would not flee yet a third country. A former solicitor general and a former justice minister.

After he had been released on bail, Schreiber stood outside the court, cameras rolling, and delivered himself of this statement:

It is, I think, a great pleasure to have friends. I have always had friends in my life. And I will never let a friend down. So they came here to get me out. I will never do anythng to harm them.

Schreiber, take two

Andrew Coyne — Mon, 03 Dec 2007 09:32:42 -0500

My previous take on Schreiber's appearance before the Commons ethics committee Thursday does not adequately convey the full weirdness of the event. Among the many magic moments:

- the chairman, Paul Szabo, beginning the proceedings, then stopping -- "I almost forgot" -- to swear the witness in.

- Schreiber acted as the middleman between Airbus/MBB/Thyssen and Government Consultants International, collecting and distributing millions of dollars in secret commissions, "to organize the things and to watch the funds flow because we had somebody who stole the money." Wha??

- Schreiber donated $10,000 to the Liberal party shortly before the 1993 election, but hasn't "the smallest clue" why.

- John Crosbie, the former Conservative Transport minister, conducted an inquiry into the Airbus contract when concerns first surfaced in the late 1980s. Schreiber says he did not interview him. (Mind you, Crosbie says the RCMP never interviewed him. Curiouser and curiouser.)

- Asked why he paid Mulroney in cash, Schreiber replied: "because it was available." Shades of Willie Sutton!

- Schreiber was once a judge. For nine years. Or so he maintained, twice, before the committee. When? Where? How much did he pay for it?