Old friends who never met

By Andrew Coyne - Wednesday, December 19, 2007 at 10:12 PM - 0 Comments

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."

By Andrew Coyne - Tuesday, December 18, 2007 at 10:55 PM - 0 Comments

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.

Photo Gallery: Havana Film Festival

By Jeff Harris - Monday, December 17, 2007 at 5:23 PM - 0 Comments

Retro theatres, vintage cars, and a total lack of American paparazzi — it’s long way from the over-hyped Hollywood film festivals you’re used to seeing in the rest of the world. The Havana Film Festival enticed only one major film star (Gael García Bernal), but still had plenty of charm as it celebrated its 29th year.

Click here for exclusive photo gallery.

Does Mulroney take us for fools?

By Andrew Coyne - Friday, December 14, 2007 at 4:21 AM - 0 Comments

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. Continue…

Questions someone really ought to ask Mulroney

By Andrew Coyne - Wednesday, December 12, 2007 at 6:34 PM - 0 Comments

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

By Andrew Coyne - Wednesday, December 12, 2007 at 5:44 PM - 0 Comments

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

By Andrew Coyne - Tuesday, December 11, 2007 at 10:38 AM - 0 Comments

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?

Pullman lite

By Brian Bethune - Thursday, December 6, 2007 at 3:59 PM - 0 Comments

Well, now we know what Philip Pullman meant by his cryptic comment, made just before the London premiere of The Golden Compass, to the effect that we shouldn’t take its underlying message too seriously. Most people understood it as an author defending his work as story not polemic, though some, more cynically, thought it was another way of saying, “The movie may offend your most cherished beliefs, true, but do come and add to the box-office gross regardless.” As it turns out though, the remark seems to have been an acknowledgement that the filmmakers bleached the novel’s “underlying philosophy” right out of the movie: better not take it seriously, because it’s not there to be taken at all.
The essential church nature of the enemy, the Magisterium (the Catholic Church’s name for its dogma-laying teaching authority), is nowhere set out for non-theologians. It is not only not called a church, it does nothing religious, like holding services. Its assassin, Fra Pavel (Simon McBurney), bears an Italian title, rather than a more recognizable “Brother,” although that may be more a nod towards ancient English suspicion of those cunning Italians from the Holy See. Pavel, by the way, has an insect daemon, while the higher-up who dispatched him on his murderous mission has a snake. In our world we say “character is destiny;” in Lyra Belacqua’s universe it’s clearly “daemon is character.”
Not to mention future occupation: the sinister northern child “care” facility at the heart of the story is guarded by a regiment of Russian soldiers, who looked like they just marched out of a Nutcracker production; each is accompanied by his wolfhound daemon. A daemon’s final form is fixed at puberty, so these bearded Tartars have been accompanied by their ferocious hounds since they were 12 or 13, long before they joined the regiment. Did they have any choice? Would anyone have hired them as oh, kindergarten teachers? Fra Pavel, having been stuck with a bug at a young age, may not have eligible for any job other than poisoner. Nor, surely, could he rise as high in the magisterium hierarchy as a guy with the snake—unless, of course, Pavel poisoned him. Given that Pullman’s Dark Materials trilogy is, in many ways, about the struggle of free will and free inquiry against received dogma, entire doctoral theses could be written about the place of predestination in the author’s imagination.
But, to return to my underlying theme, it’s harder to decide what to make of the absence of Pullman’s. The film is beautiful to look at, (reasonably) faithful to the narrative and technically superb: no child’s visual imagination will be insulted. (The reaction of one 13-year-old of my acquaintance says it all: “Awesome, totally awesome; can we go again next week?”) Most of the overt anti-religious parts—like the death of God—are in volume three. And, to be fair, film critics, not an overly devout crew, were loudly pleased two years ago when the movie version of the first Narnia book, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, dialled its underlying (Christian) theme way, way down. Movies, at least of the expensive production kind, need to attract broad audiences.
Yet Pullman was always open about having written the anti—Narnia, how Lewis’s original was “nauseating drivel,” and how Christianity was an enormous and oppressive mistake. His own powerfully expressed anti-authoritarian moral vision was one of the driving engines of his story. Its absence makes The Golden Compass film feel as empty as a spun-sugar castle, however wonderful it looks.

Der skandalnamenkontest

By Andrew Coyne - Monday, December 3, 2007 at 10:54 AM - 0 Comments

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, or Leaderhoser. 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?

By Andrew Coyne - Monday, December 3, 2007 at 10:34 AM - 0 Comments

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

By Andrew Coyne - Monday, December 3, 2007 at 10:32 AM - 0 Comments

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?