A curious lack of curiosity

I was going to post something along these lines, but this note from reader Michael Colwell says it rather better...

Doesn't it strike you that Mr. Martin suffers from a striking lack of curiosity?� On the sponsorship scandal he has admitted that he heard rumors and saw newspaper articles, but never sent anyone to dig into the stories.� Here in BC there were rumours about inappropriate activities related to the installation of a Martin-friendly leadership in the provincial wing of the federal Liberal party (and now the RCMP is investigating) - and in fact this same pattern of mass-signings and Martin-friendly takeovers seems to have occurred across Canada.� Again, he has said he heard rumours, but he doesn't seem to have done anything about it.� Finally, we had the CSL scandal, which dominated the news until the A-G report came out.� Once again, Martin heard the story in the news, knew something didn't seem right, but never took any action to shed light on the issue.� I believe he said he was too busy running a leadership campaign. I have had the good fortune to work with some excellent leaders in my career, and the one defining characteristic that sets the excellent leaders apart from the pack is curiosity; the desire to know what's going on and the unwillingness to let things stand when they suspected something wasn't right. Martin's modus operandi seems to be "if it seems like something is amiss, I had better not look too closely, I might find something I don't like.� Better to say I knew nothing."� The Sgt. Schultz doctrine.� Not exactly inspiring, is it?� His promises of change don't seem credible in light of his past.� As Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, �What you do speaks so loudly that I cannot hear what you say.��� Except in this case it's what he "doesn't do."

Exactly. He heard "rumours" and read "newspaper articles" that the party in which he had spent his whole life was running a vast money-laundering scheme, and he didn't even think to pick up the phone? UPDATE: One possible reason -- Claude Boulay, president of Groupe Everest, used to work for him.