Wait for Gomery! Don't wait for Gomery!

The head of the inquiry into the sponsorship scandal says there is no reason yet to believe that all of the money that Jean Brault says he funnelled to the federal Liberals reached its destination. Justice John Gomery said Wednesday that many of Brault's claims aren't backed by evidence. He says much of the $1.76 million in illicit payments alleged by the former Groupaction Marketing president haven't yet been corroborated... "I have no basis for concluding the full $1,763,000 ever found its way to the Liberal party. "I have a basis for thinking that some of these amounts surely did, and I have a basis for thinking that some other amounts may have. Quite a lot of the evidence, I'm not going to be able to come to any conclusion whatsoever."

This shows an estimable fair-mindedness on the judge's part. Why, it's almost as if he was open to persuasion by the evidence, rather than having his mind made up from the start. But the Liberals want to prejudge the inquiry's work! Why won't they wait until all of the evidence has come out? Isn't it better to hear all of the witnesses' testimony, some of which conflicts with others, rather than make selective use of the most sensational allegations? Let Judge Gomery do his work! (Repeat twelve times, or until the end of Question Period, whichever comes first.) MORE: Gomery's inability to say conclusively where all the money ended up reflects that of the inquiry's forensic auditors, Kroll Lindquist Avey, who said more or less the same thing yesterday. Mind you, it's not entirely hard to see why:

At the request of inquiry lawyers who didn't want them to interfere with the work of the police, Kroll's specialists did not scrutinize transactions that were the subject of criminal charges or continuing criminal investigations. The Kroll investigators sorted through an estimated 28.3 million pages from 7,068 boxes of subpoenaed documents. However, incomplete agency records restricted the investigators' work, the report says. For example, in the case of Mr. Corriveau -- who, according to the Kroll firm earned $5.5-million in salary, bonuses and dividends during the sponsorship period -- the forensic accountants could not gain access to his bank records from 1994 to 1999.

So Kroll looked at every transaction except the criminal ones, and examined every bank account except Jacques Corriveau's? What are we paying these people for? LESS:

Also, the Kroll investigators came under questioning about their inability to spot that the owners of at least one ad firm involved in the scandal had an overseas bank account. Report co-author Robert Macdonald had told the inquiry Tuesday that Kroll's accountants found no off-shore accounts. But Sylvain Lussier, a lawyer for the government of Canada, asked if they had checked an Ottawa Citizen report about the South Carolina home of Claude Boulay and Diane Deslauriers, the owners of Groupe Everest. The property is owned by an offshore corporation registered in the Bahamas, the report said. Mr. Macdonald conceded that while his team tried to look at relevant records, it hadn't been able to scrutinize all the financial statements of all the ad executives embroiled in the scandal. “We didn't look at everybody's personal banks to find out how they spend the money they received from their businesses year after year,” he said.

Sorry, isn't that what a forensic accountant does? Okay, maybe I'm asking too much, but would it kill you to read a newspaper once in a while?