Liar exonerates liar

If I didn’t know that the Ethics Committee couldn’t coordinate their way out of a paper bag, I’d swear the fix was in. The committee’s performance on day two of Karlheinz Schreiber’s appearance before it was an embarrassment -- even worse, if possible, than the first day....

When they weren’t fawning over him (“You'll be sleeping in your own bed hopefully tonight.”) they were interrupting him, or each other, or the translators were interrupting them both. Schreiber’s rambling answers were as incomprehensible as always, a product perhaps as much of a disordered mind as of his fractured English. But the committee only made matters worse. Most of the questions they should have asked they didn’t. Most of the questions they did ask were rubbish. Where members managed a coherent question, they generally went unanswered, and on those few occasions when he began to give an answer, they would abruptly shift to another question, or indeed another questioner.

So we never got an explanation of what Mulroney did for the money, or why Schreiber paid him in cash, or why he continued to pay him if, as he maintains, Mulroney did nothing for it. In the same way, we are no closer to understanding what Schreiber did for the $20 million he was paid in secret Airbus commissions, or what he did with it, or why it was such a big secret that both sides denied the existence of such an arrangement for years.

No one asked him why the commissions were funnelled through such a complex array of shell companies and coded bank accounts, or why he did not declare them as income, or why, when it came time to pay Frank Moores, he used a phony invoicing system to cover his tracks.

Even at that, Schreiber managed to paint a deeply disturbing picture of how business was done in Mulroney’s Ottawa. At least, it was disturbing to me. For his part, the elfin arms dealer seemed entirely at ease with the notion of money buying influence and influence buying money -- many of his “defences” or “denials” amounted to saying, yes, I did it, so what?

So we were treated to a jolly scene of Frank Moores setting up shop as a lobbyist shortly after helping Mulroney ascend to power, in the expectation that he and his friends would now reap their rewards -- and that Mulroney would be rewarded in his turn:

Mr. Moores then explained to me that all these people are around, of course, they look for their own interests as well. One wants to become a minister; the other one wants to go become a member of his staff at the PMO, like Michel Cogger, or others become ministers like Coates, or whatever. Because I asked him about his job, he has incorporated, or will incorporate a company with the name Altanova, which is a lobbying company. He explained to me, “You can imagine when that company is in place and we have all our friends there, really they can help do business, create jobs, do business and make money.”

Yes, made sense to me. I said, “Well, and how is this going to work?” He said, “We'll do this and I am convinced this will go fine.” I said to him, “What is Mr. Mulroney's position in this?”

“Well,” he said, “when he is not Prime Minister anymore, he will join us later on, because he has to live on something anyhow.”

The whole disgraceful episode in which Schreiber and Franz Josef Strauss, then the premier of Bavaria and chairman of Airbus Industrie, bankrolled the take-down of Joe Clark at the 1983 convention is dismissed as “the Joe Clark thing.” The explanation? “Money was needed, and that great surprise... what airport the delegates from Montreal to Winnipeg. Got a lot of laughs on that.” Ha, ha, yes: foreign money, and foreign interests, fixing a Canadian party leadership contest. What a riot.

So Mulroney had ample reason to be grateful, if not beholden to Schreiber from the start. As did Moores, whose involvement as a lobbyist for Airbus -- something both he and Mulroney had always hotly denied -- Schreiber confirmed with an exchange of letters between Moores and Strauss. And while Moores was setting up GCI to cash in on his ties with Mulroney, Schreiber was signing up German heavy industry left, right and centre -- Airbus, Thyssen, MBB -- based on … what? These are big companies. They have their own sales forces. What service did Schreiber have to offer them?

Ralph Goodale made a stab at it. “Did Airbus authorize any payments to be made to facilitate the contract?” he asked. “If so, to whom were those payments to be made, when were they made, how much were they and were these amounts deductible as expenses on the Airbus side?”

That’s actually five questions, which is part of the problem. You will see from the transcript that Schreiber does not in fact answer any of them:

It is quite different, sir. It is not money you spend or do with money based on the success, it was the commission. Do you understand? No business, no commission. In other words, the official agreement which was made with Airbus through a company, IAL, which is the trust company in Liechtenstein, which, by the way, doesn't belong to me, this is another one and it is not even necessary, because you could have been there and be the trustee for Airbus, or GCI.

Now, when the success is there and you get your commission on the business, and this was stated, by the way, from the RCMP at the beginning as well, GCI, if they want to get paid in Switzerland, it's not illegal. As long as they declare the tax in Canada whenever they take money out or whatever the tax was, it's the end of the story, they can decide whatever they want—and that was my job.

When you speak about these helpful donations, which was a very, very big world in all these years, it was always a discussion from the industry and the government, “Look, there are other many countries, they do this all over the place”. That's true, it's absolutely true. I mean, I witnessed this everywhere. You have to get the possibility to deduct these, no?

No explanation of who, when, or how much, still less whether they were deductible. Just that it’s not illegal and everybody does it. Oh and that whopper about IAL not belonging to him.

Goodale, thoroughly buffaloed, hurried on: “I may well want to return to that later on, particularly after I've had the opportunity to read some of the paper that you've filed today.” Another seemingly straightforward question. “You made an arrangement with Prime Minister Mulroney on June 23, 1993, at Harrington Lake, to provide him with $500,000. Is that correct?”

No. “We did not speak about money.” It was all just an agreement in principle that Mulroney would do... what?

It was more or less all based on what he told me is his belief, that Kim Campbell is going to win the election and have another majority government and he would be in a comfortable position, eh? Easy to understand. How it is today, right? Very simple.

A comfortable position: just as Moores had traded on his connections with Mulroney, Mulroney would trade on his connections with Campbell. All perfectly normal in Schreiber’s view. And, indeed, in much of the reaction to his testimony. It was just a “failed business deal,” Tory MP Russ Hiebert told reporters afterward. A failed business deal between a lobbyist and a former prime minister, the latter promising to use his influence in the government he has just left to procure benefits for the former, and the whole thing transacted in cash. Very simple.

Alas, whatever services Mulroney could perform died with the Campbell government.

This project is not there because Kim Campbell did not get a majority government and he could do nothing. I mean, you will agree with me that he could not have gone to Mr. Chrétien and say now give Thyssen the project, right?

No indeed. In the same way, Mulroney couldn’t have had anything to do with the Airbus deal, Schreiber explained, because Air Canada was “a Liberal property.” I mean, the very idea. “If Mulroney would have just shown up five miles away from Air Canada they would have done the opposite from everything he wanted.”

Except that Mulroney replaced the entire Air Canada board with Conservative partisans. Five days after Schreiber signed his secret deal with Airbus. The one that stipulated that it became void in the event of “major political change” in Canada. No one pointed this out.

And one of those board members? Frank Moores. The Mulroney fundraiser. The lobbyist for Airbus. New Democrat Pat Martin asked about this, eliciting this answer:

I think that the appointment to Air Canada was somehow a signal to the Europeans that Frank Moores was the right guy. Mr. Mulroney supported all the business from GCI, as far as I can see.

No followup.

The GCI boys having collected the “Europeans’” money with the “support” of Mulroney, they set about dividing the spoils. Except it seems they had a falling out:

There was always a fight between the Doucets and Frank Moores and Gary Ouellet. But, you see, they were shareholders. The money which came to Switzerland, to the account, belonged to the shareholders of GCI. So now, Fred Doucet always wanted to know from me whether the figures he received from Frank Moores were correct because this affected the money that came there. I did not want to be involved in this so I said “Leave me alone. You speak to Moores. I cannot go into your internal business.” And then he said “I want you to make sure that from this account money will be transferred to a law firm in Geneva --”

Yes? Yes? The law firm in Geneva? The one Schreiber referred to in his Nov. 7 affidavit, perhaps? But by then the questioner, Carole Lavellee of the Bloc, had lost the plot:

Mme Carole Lavallée (interrupting): Je veux simplement savoir d'où provenait l'argent qui était dans le compte Britan? 
 The Chair: Last question.

And the moment was lost.

I don’t want to say there were no useful questions, no revealing answers. From Thomas Mulcair’s interrogation, for example, we learned that the RCMP did not question Schreiber in the course of its “investigation” (as John Crosbie did not before them with his), and that Schreiber did not give any money to any political figures -- other than Mulroney, Moores, Doucet, Marc Lalonde, Jean Charest’s brother, etc. -- in Canada.

But never any money to Mulroney, or not while he was prime minister. And not for any service he performed in the office. To Tory partisans, that’s all that matters. The same crowd who were baying for Schreiber to be put on the next plane not two days ago, insisting he was a con man, a liar and a thief who was not to be trusted, now trumpet his testimony as having exonerated Mulroney. (Aside from the extended rant about what a "liar" he is, that is.)

And, the committee having failed to turn up any evidence -- after precisely one witness -- of criminal wrongdoing on the former prime minister’s part, the same people will now insist that a fullscale public inquiry is no longer necessary. On the contrary, the committee’s flabby interrogation of Schreiber shows exactly why an inquiry is needed. The point is not to convict Mulroney, or to exonerate him. The point is to find out what happened. Or at least to ask.