[LINK] "The end of Brian Mulroney"

[rfmcdonald]

Last year's investigation/circus surrounding the question of whether former Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney was bribed has ended by wrecking his public reputation.

If Brian Mulroney had a reputation left, Justice Jeffrey Oliphant shredded it today.

Mr. Oliphant’s report on the relationship between the former prime minister and German arms dealer Karlheinz Schreiber found that neither man can necessarily be taken at his word, even when they’re testifying before a judge.

In several instances, Mr. Oliphant said, he simply didn’t accept Mr. Schreiber’s account of the facts — a nice way of saying the little German influence peddler was making stuff up. Or, as the judge nicely put it, “I was struck by his proclivity for exaggeration.”

But it was Mr. Mulroney who came in for a much tougher time. The word Mr. Oliphant used most often was “inappropriate.” Much tougher terms could easily have substituted.

He said he didn’t believe Mr. Mulroney’s testimony that his decision to accept envelopes full of cash was just “bad judgment.” If that was the case, he said, Mr. Mulroney had many opportunities to correct the mistake, and rejected every one. He could have issued Mr. Schreiber a receipt, demanded cheques, or put the money in a bank where there would have been a record. He didn’t do any of them. And he continued to take more envelopes even after having time to think about the propriety of accepting the first. An “error in judgment” applies to one mistake; making the same mistake three times over a lengthy period is something else.

Instead of doing his best to rectify his mistake in accepting the cash, said Mr. Oliphant, Mr. Mulroney deliberately sought to hide the fact he’d taken the money. In this he and Mr. Schreiber thought as one: “They both wanted to conceal the fact that the transactions had occurred between them.” The best opportunity for Mr. Mulroney to have come clean, Mr. Oliphant said, was during Mr. Mulroney’s suit over allegations related to the Airbus affair. Mr. Mulroney claimed he didn’t reveal the full extent of his dealings because he wasn’t asked the appropriate questions, an argument Mr. Oliphant dismissed as “patently absurd.” He noted it was during Mr. Mulroney’s years in office that a tough, new ethics code was introduced, which required public officials to act in a way “that will bear the closest public scrutiny,” and added that in his estimation, Mr. Mulroney failed his own test.

“The conduct exhibited by Mr. Mulroney in accepting cash-stuffed envelopes from Mr. Schreiber on three separate occasions, failing to record the fact of the cash payments, failing to deposit the cash into a bank or other financial institution, and failing to disclose the fact of the cash payments when given the opportunity to do so goes a long way, in my view, to supporting my position that the financial dealings between Mr. Schreiber and Mr. Mulroney were inappropriate,” he said.