(Formerly titled: The myth of political vendetta in the Royal Canadian Mounted Police’s Airbus Affair investigation against former Prime Minister Brian Mulroney, and some community undercurrents against the RCMP)
The long awaited, long-overdue Canadian government inquiry into the Airbus Affair involving former Prime Minister Brian Mulroney, German-Canadian businessman Karlheinz Schreiber, and millions of dollars in commissions rumored to have included kickbacks to Mr. Mulroney personally from a 1988 sale of European Airbus planes to Air Canada – a hot topic of Canadian federal politics for well over a decade, 1, 2 – is finally getting started at the end of this March 2009. How exciting it is for the Canadian political scene.
Or is it?
Not really. A Canadian government public inquiry headed by Justice Jeffrey J. Oliphant of Manitoba is indeed underway in its preliminary stage and the first phase of the inquiry into the facts will begin in late March in Ottawa. 3 But this inquiry is not about the Airbus Affair, only into allegations made by Mr. Schreiber in a civil lawsuit against Mulroney and during hearings held by the Canadian parliamentary Ethics Committee, in 2007-08, that he had a business service agreement in 1993 with Mr. Mulroney while the latter was still the prime minister, that he then in accordance gave Mr. Mulroney three cash payments totalling $300,000 during 1993-94 shortly after the latter had stepped down, and that Mr. Mulroney subsequently did nothing, or very little, to justify the payments. 4 Mr. Mulroney however stated during the Ethics Committee hearings that he got into some sort of business consulting arrangement with Mr. Schreiber only after he had left the prime minister position, that he has fully done his part in the agreement despite receiving only $225,000 (rather than the promised $300,000) from Mr. Schreiber, and that there is no need for a public inquiry. 5
How boring it is to do something there no need, or only insignificant need for – even Justice Oliphant makes more than the money in question for his honourable work on the matter.
In fact, there might not have been any inquiry scheduled on any question about the ethics and conduct of former Prime Minister Brian Mulroney, at all, despite the kind of things that have dogged him since shortly after he became national leader and continued through when he was leaving office in 1993 and making decision to accept money from businessman Karlheinz Schreiber. 6, 7, 8 Represented by renowned Toronto criminal lawyer Edward Greenspan, Mr. Schreiber has been under increasing pressure since after he became a criminally accused fraudster in Germany in 1999 (a far cry from the earlier days when he was once a district court judge in Munich) related to a corruption scandal dogging former German Chancellor Helmut Kohl as well as to the Airbus Affair, facing deportation by Canadian authorities; but initially he continued to deny having any role in the Airbus Affair (or having given any money to Mulroney). 9, 10 Schreiber however began to realize that Mulroney was publicly turning negative toward him just as his political-connection fortune started declining – demonstrated in a CBC interview with Mulroney spokesman Luc Lavoie in October 1999 when Lavoie called Schreiber “the biggest f..king liar the world has ever seen” – and he decided to file a lawsuit to get $300,000 “compensatory damages” from Mulroney; that led to a media report in late 2000/early 2001 about Schreiber having paid Mulroney $300,000, and finally to November 2003 when Schreiber talked to one of the leading experts on the Airbus Affair, author William Kaplan, nonetheless emphasizing that the money was not part of any Airbus commission. 11 The breaking of silence by Mr. Schreiber came about seven months after the Royal Canadian Mounted Police who had spent years investigating Mulroney’s role in the Airbus Affair, had announced in April 2003 that the Airbus Affair criminal investigation against Mulroney was terminated without finding evidence for a criminal proceeding against Mulroney. 12
Mr. Karlheinz Schreiber then became more and more indignant as his lost one after another legal battle to avoid extradition to Germany where he is to face criminal charges; he made appeals to Prime Minister Stephen Harper, he was adamant that he is not going back there without being given the opportunity to account how he was ‘ripped off’ $300,000 by the (former) Canadian prime minister he has been dealing with in his second homeland since the early 1970s, and he talked about “public trust”, “clean up” and “fundamental justice” versus “abuse of power”, “criminal activity” and “totalitarian Governments”. 13
But it would not be an easy demand for Prime Minister Stephen Harper for whom Mr. Mulroney has been some sort of a patron since 2003-04 when Mulroney encouraged a merger between Harper’s up-and-coming but largely western Canada-based Canadian Alliance and his old, practically unelectable Progressive Conservative Party; 14 and in any case Prime Minister Harper’s staff did not even forward Schreiber’s letters to the prime minister: by the time Mr. Harper learned about Schreiber’s allegation of Mulroney taking $300,000 from Schreiber but doing no work (the first time sometime in early November 2007 according to the prime minister’s spokeswoman Sandra Buckler), the Canadian House of Commons Ethics Committee was already planning to fulfill Mr. Schreiber’s wish. 15
Prime Minister Harper then turned to an academic, Dr. David Johnston, president of the University of Waterloo, to advise him what to do while the parliamentary ethics committee hearings featuring Schreiber, Mulroney, Mulroney’s long-time aide Fred Doucet and others were under way; Dr. Johnston reported back that there should be a limited public inquiry based on Karlheinz Schreiber’s allegations about Brian Mulroney, but that there is no necessity to include the Airbus Affair in the scope of the public inquiry because the RCMP had spent years conducing a criminal investigation into that, found “insufficient evidence” and closed its file; Dr. Johnston referred to the Airbus Affair as “this well-tilled ground”. 16
A bit of Mr. Harper’s favor for Mr. Mulroney, and a lot of ‘RCMP’s done that’, no wonder the Oliphant inquiry will be so limited in what it examines, i.e., without the Airbus Affair.
But wait. It turns out the Oliphant inquiry could still be more than only about the $300,000 or $225,000 in dispute between the two gentlemen, Mr. Schreiber and Mr. Mulroney. The Terms of Reference of the inquiry, as decided by Prime Minister Stephen Harper on the recommendations of Dr. David Johnston, say to examine the “business and financial dealings between Mr. Schreiber and Mr. Mulroney”, and that what those dealings were is within the matters the Oliphant Commission will determine. 17
Well, Airbus kickbacks to Mr. Mulroney, from Mr. Schreiber directly for some job by Mr. Mulroney in the Prime Minister’s chair? Mr. Mulroney couldn’t be that dumb, could he? 18, 19, 20, 21
And so more of a bore it will be if others do not hear more surprises from Mr. Karlheinz Schreiber during these upcoming hearings of the Oliphant Commission.
Some people may raise objections to my above-expressed opinion right away, that maybe even the RCMP have beaten a ‘dead horse’ to death too many times, that there was indeed nothing there. For instance, when the RCMP in April 2003 announced termination of its Airbus Affair investigation, then Progressive Conservative MP, justice critic and leadership contender Peter Mackay, son of former Mulroney government’s solicitor general Elmer Mackay who has been a personal friend of Karlheinz Schreiber, commented, “It’s a sad comment that it took the RCMP this long to come to the conclusion that there was insufficient evidence to proceed”, and declared, “I see it as a total, unqualified vindication of Mr. Mulroney and his complete innocence in this entire affair”. 22, 23 Earlier, in August 1999 over two-and-a-half years after the Canadian government had settled a civil lawsuit with Mulroney, Mr. Mulroney’s spokesman Luc Lavoie made the accusation that there was a “political vendetta” behind the continuing RCMP criminal investigation (probably seeing that the investigation was going to continue well into the New Millennium). 24
An obvious counter-argument to the views dismissing any questionable role on the part of then Prime Minister Brian Mulroney in the 1988 Airbus deal or in the Airbus Affair, is that Karlheinz Schreiber himself used to be as righteous in his claim of not having had anything to do with the Airbus deal or any business dealing with Mr. Mulroney, and now in the past few years Mr. Schreiber not only stated openly that he had received millions of dollars of commissions from the Airbus company much of which he distributed to persons in Canada and that he had given Mr. Mulroney $300,000 (which was separate from the Airbus money), but also has become the greatest ‘crusader’ against Mulroney’s alleged abuse of public trust.
For instance, in an 1995 interview with Harvey Cashore of The Fifth Estate TV-program of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation – recalled by the CBC in October 1999 when its efforts to uncover the facts still did not receive cooperation from Schreiber – Mr. Schreiber said: 25
“I have told you already, whether you believe it or not: I played no role at all. I played no role at all on the Airbus”.
And yet by early November 2007 when he was trying hard to avoid extradition to Germany, railing against “abuse of power” by Mr. Mulroney earlier when the latter was prime minister, Mr. Schreiber took an extra legal step to try to expose Mulroney’s role in the Airbus Affair, a role that was connected to the company Government Consultants International, an Ottawa lobbying firm during the Mulroney era founded by Frank Moores, Mr. Mulroney’s appointee to the Air Canada board, according to a report in The Globe and Mail newspaper: 26
“An adviser to former prime minister Brian Mulroney asked Karlheinz Schreiber to transfer funds, made in connection with Air Canada’s 1988 purchase of Airbus airplanes, to Mr. Mulroney’s lawyer in Geneva, Switzerland, according to an affidavit sworn by Mr. Schreiber and filed Thursday in the Ontario Superior Court of Justice.
The affidavit states that Mr. Schreiber informed Mr. Mulroney during a meeting at Zurich’s Hotel Savoy on Feb. 2, 1998 that one of Mr. Mulroney’s closest friends and advisers, Fred Doucet, had asked him to transfer funds "related to the Airbus deal" from the lobby firm, Government Consultants International, or GCI, to Mr. Mulroney’s Swiss lawyer.”
Such new and shocking revelation would make one wonder what else important Mr. Schreiber may have yet to disclose (even if in the case of the above accusation Mr. Mulroney’s spokesman denied it, stating that Mr. Mulroney never had a lawyer in Geneva, Switzerland). 27
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