Mr. Mulroney was favourable to the project that would have seen the construction of a Light Armoured Vehicle (LAV) factory. Unemployment rates in parts of the region were as high as 50%. “If someone tells me I can create 500 new jobs with multiple spinoff jobs, you can bet your bottom dollar that I and any other Prime Minister of Canada would be interested immediately.”

Mt. Mulroney acknowledged that this context does not explain his actions. The business relationship he had with Mr. Schreiber upon leaving office was “legal and did not involve any wrongdoing.” He added that he regrets the circumstances that gave rise to suspicions of their propriety. However he noted the importance of the smear campaign waged against him shortly after he left office:

The 1995 RCMP Letter of Request to Swiss authorities accused Mr. Mulroney of being a criminal. The informants on these false allegations were Stevie Cameron - a journalist turned RCMP informant and Georgio Pelossi - a convicted felon. The Government abandoned its case upon challenge.

“Mr. Commissioner, the enormity of those events scarred me and my family for life and it explains my conduct in trying to keep private the private commercial transaction I entered into with Mr. Schreiber after I left office so as to avoid the same kind of deceitful and false purveying of information that led to the Airbus matter in the first place.”

Canadians were also asked to rate the inquiry in terms of whether or not it is a good use of tax dollars. Canadians overwhelmingly believed that the inquiry is a poor use of tax dollars (net score of -48). Of note, the trend noted above concerning Ontarians’ resistance to the inquiry presented itself again for this question. Respondents in Ontario were more likely to consider the inquiry as a poor use of tax dollars (net score of -57).”

Read the complete story here (PDF).

Pratte: “The contract was made — the agreement was made — at Mirabel.”

Schreiber: “Absolutely.”

7 November 2007

“15. On Jun 23, 1993 Mr. Doucet, at the request of Mr. Mulroney, arranged a meeting between me and Mr. Mulroney which took place on June 23, 199, at Harrington Lake, the official summer residence of the Prime Minister (the “Harrington Lake Meeting”). It was at this meeting that Mr. Mulroney and I entered into the Agreement. On June 23, 1993 Mr. Mulroney was still in office as Prime Minister of Canada and consequently resided at 24 Sussex Drive, Ottawa, Ontario.

16. One of the terms of the agreement which Mr. Mulroney agreed to on June 23, 1993 was that Mr. Mulroney would perform certain services on my behalf. Mr. Mulroney undertook to support my efforts in obtaining approval of the establishment of a product facility for light armoured vehicles by Bear Head Industries Limited, and we discussed that if matters got difficult in the Province of Nova Scotia, then Mr. Mulroney would assist in moving party of the project to the Province of Quebec (the “Bear Head Quebec Project”).”

(Schreiber affidavit)

Your casual slur of former Prime Minister Brian Mulroney, in your drive-by smear of the Canadian justice system overall offended this reader and many Canadians. To elide the frequently refuted allegations by his accuser with the felony judgements of Canadian courts is dishonest if not slanderous. Mr.Mulroney and his family have endured fifteen years of endless probes into Karlheinz Schreiber’s ever-shifting tales. Mr. Mulroney has been vindicated every time. Not a shred of proof of wrongdoing has ever been proved. The claims have been the subject of one governmental, two police, and one House of Commons investigation, plus a secret trial.

Your one-sided analysis failed to inform your readers that this judicial inquiry is Mr. Schreiber’s latest attempt at avoiding extradition to Germany where he faces allegations of fraud, tax evasion and bribery. This sixth, and hopefully final rehash of Mr. Schreiber’s shopworn tale came after Justice Michael Phelan called Schreiber’s games a “last-minute,” “last-grasp” and “last-ditch” attempt to avoid extradition in June 2007. Schreiber has been rejected by the courts, including the Supreme Court, on several occasions.

Sincerely,

Robin V. Sears
Toronto Canada

In The Time of his Life, Frank Moores tells Janice Wells his side of the so-called Airbus affair. Wells, a respected columnist, author, and political commentator from Newfoundland has been accused by national media of being fooled by Moores, but the author believes that others have been fooled, and are continuing to be fooled, by Karlheinz Schreiber, who refused repeated requests by Wells for an interview when she was researching the book.

Wells says “ The true story may never be known, but weighing all the ‘evidence’ to date, the most logical conclusion is that Schreiber orchestrated the whole thing to cover the fact that he took 20 million dollars in commissions he didn’t earn because Airbus was chosen on its own merits; that he manipulated everyone, including Canadian parliamentarians, the Canadian justice system, the RCMP and the media, to perpetrate his scam and is still manipulating them to avoid extradition to Germany.

“The encouraging thing is that this Inquiry is being conducted by legal experts who know the difference between so called evidence and proof” she says. “Perhaps after part 1 of the Inquiry, the madness of giving this fugitive a stage to say anything about anyone in order to keep himself in Canada and out of a German jail will stop, and his only contribution to ethical reforms will be as an example of all that can go wrong.”

For more information on the book Frank Moores: The Time of His Life
or to receive a copy please contact Pat Cairns at 905 569-0002 or creativeconnect@rogers.com

Sir:
Further to your e-mail of Friday June 6,2008, I write to advise that Mr. Mulroney respectfully declines the Committee’s invitation to re-attend on June 12, 2008.

Mr. Mulroney has already provided four hours of testimony to the Ethics Committee in December 2007, as well as copies of the relevant documentation within his possession. The Committee having filed its final report to Parliament in early April of this year, and the Chair having declined to particularize the new matters upon which the Committee wishes to hear further from Mr. Mulroney, no useful purpose would be served by his re-attendance. In any event, the upcoming public inquiry should now be allowed to take its course.

Sir:

Prior to Mr. Mulroney considering the Committee’s request for his re-appearance, please advise as to the subjects the members want to canvass that have not already been covered by Mr. Mulroney and other witnesses during the Committee’s lengthy hearings, and which were the subject of the Committee’s final report and recommendations to Parliament.

Yours truly,

Mtre Tommy Tremblay, on behalf of Mtre Guy J. Pratte.

For more than 15 years Karlheinz Schreiber has played games with investigators and journalists, has attempted to make a fool of the Canadian justice system and has most recently perjured himself before the House of Commons Ethics Committee. It is a style and a routine of which he is proud and has often bragged. For example, he told a reporter from Der Stern, the German news magazine, quoted in “The Last Amigo:”

“I feel like a cat sitting on a cage full of mice, and I don’t know which one to eat next.”

Key to his endless game of hide and seek with journalists and the justice system has been Mr. Schreiber’s claim to possess mountains of damning evidence related to each of his improbable allegations. But when challenged, his evidence is never revealed.

In the same cocky vein, on the eve of his appearance before the Commons Ethics Committee, in an interview with “As it Happens,” on the CBC, on November 2, 2007, Schreiber said, “I have documents and very important information placed at safe places so if something would really happen to me, then it would all be disclosed.”

In his first four appearances before the committee despite direct requests from several committee members to produce the evidence he had so often bragged about, Schreiber continued to duck and refused to deliver.

Therefore, the first essential question that Mr. Schreiber must be made to answer is:

“What are the names of the Canadian politicians, bureaucrats, or corporate officials in Canada you claimed to have made payments to, in what amounts and when?”

QUESTION #2

The origin of Mr. Schreiber’s current campaign of vilification against Mr. Mulroney and unnamed Canadian officials is, of course, his effort to avoid extradition to Germany to face eight criminal charges relating to his business activities. Among them are income tax evasion, defrauding the government of Germany and Saudi Arabia, defrauding his employer Thyssen Industrie, accepting and offering illegal commissions and rewards, in other words, bribes.

His arrest in Toronto in 1999 triggered his long battle to avoid being required to face these charges. Two of his former business associates have not been so fortunate. In 2007, Juergen Massman and Winfried Haastert were both convicted by German Federal Court. Their convictions were based in part on proof of their having received illegal payments from bank accounts controlled by Schreiber.

Yet Mr. Schreiber has offered both to the Commons Committee and to a Canadian court directly contradictory testimony about those accounts. In the Motion Record, a public document on his extradition proceedings (dated July 20, 2007), the court received a report of the German authorities on Mr. Schreiber’s banking records. On page 116 it declares that Mr. Schreiber “has economic control of assets to be brought in from account PO-18679,” in other words the IAL account.

Indeed, in the German court proceedings related to his fraud charge trial, the management of the Swiss Bank Corporation, where the account resides, testified that “the defendant, Karlheinz Schreiber is the owner of account 18679 and authorized his wife, Barbara Schreiber to operate this account. The authorization was signed by the defendant Schreiber…”

Schreiber’s former accountant, Georgio Pelossi in his testimony to the Commons Committee said, “When we had a falling out [Schreiber] told everybody it had nothing to do with IAL, it’s not his company, it’s somebody else’s company and such stories. This was the first time he began to lie. Now he’s lying every time he tells you something. His only goal is to stay in Canada and not be deported to Germany.”

However, in his December 6 testimony before the committee, Mr. Schreiber declared “I never transferred any money from IAL to another account because this is another lie [that] IAL belongs to Schreiber which is not true.”

So the question Mr. Schreiber must answer: “Is the Swiss Bank Corporation, the holder of accounts in question lying when they testify to a German court that Mr. Schreiber was the holder of the account and authorized his wife to operate it, or was he lying to the committee when he claimed it was not his?”

QUESTION #3

Mr. Schreiber has also been entrapped by his contradictions about the payments he claimed to have made from the accounts he denies he controlled. Edward Greenspan, Mr. Schreiber’s lawyer, wrote the CBC’s “Fifth Estate” protesting their intention to claim that one of the accounts under Mr. Schreiber’s control, the so-called ‘BRITAN’ account, was set up for the benefit of Mr. Mulroney.

Mr. Greenspan said that to make such an allegation would be “a false, inaccurate, malicious, groundless inference. There’s no resemblance to the truth in that reckless suggestion.”

However, in his testimony before the Ethics Committee on December 6, 2007, asked by the committee member, Dave Van Kesteren what the BRITAN account was, Schreiber answered “BRITAN stands for Brain Mulroney…” Further challenged about when he opened the account he said “it must have been a couple weeks after my meeting with Mr. Mulroney at Harrington Lake…”

Mr. Pelossi in his testimony before the committee also reported that Mr. Schreiber had claimed that there was another account set up for the benefit of Mr. Mulroney, the so-called “DEVON” account. When asked why Mr. Schreiber would have made that claim, he answered “the only reason, I think, is it was because I was entitled to 20% of the profit… if he pays 50% to somebody else, that is [his] cost.”

The question for Mr. Schreiber, therefore is: “Who is lying about the ‘BRITAN’ account, Mr. Schreiber to his own lawyer, Mr. Greenspan; Mr. Pelossi, his own accountant at the time; or Mr. Schreiber himself?”

QUESTION #4

Mr. Schreiber also has a tendency to claim meetings and relationships with individuals who deny any such contact. For example, in connection with the Airbus case, Mr. Schreiber claimed before the Commons Ethics Committee that “you may take it as fact that I met quite often with Claude Taylor [Chairman of Air Canada].” However, in the January 28, 2008 edition of Maclean’s they report him saying, “This is another myth. I never shook his hand. He has told people that he visited my office, but he never did.”

Similarly, Mr. Schreiber has maintained that he met with Mr. Mulroney at Harrington Lake for the purpose of engaging him as a representative of Thyssen Bear Head. He testified before the Ethics Committee in response to a question from Russ Hiebert about the agreement as follows:

Mr. Russ Hiebert:
You had an agreement. Okay. Can you tell us when you established that agreement?
Mr. Karlheinz Schreiber:
It was at Harrington Lake.

However, in his sworn testimony on November 24, 2004 in the Eurocopter case, Mr. Schreiber said in response to a question from the prosecutor that “I had many things in mind, and I told you, I wanted to hire Mr. Mulroney for Thyssen to be doing the same thing he was doing now, and it would have been a nice thing to have a previous Canadian Prime Minister on a peacekeeping track for Thyssen products.”

The prosecutor asked: “….What time are we talking about?”

Mr. Schreiber answered: “After Mr. Mulroney has left government.”

The prosecutor persisted: “After he had stepped down as Prime Minister?”

Mr. Schreiber answered, “Yes. Yeah.”

So the question for Mr. Schreiber is: “Did he lie to the court in the Eurocopter case about the Harrington Lake meeting, or did he lie to the Ethics Committee?”

QUESTION #5
In early May 2007, Mr. Schreiber was incarcerated pending a court decision on his extradition appeal. Having already been turned down twice in previous appeals, he sent a blackmail letter to Mr. Mulroney, threatening among other things to disclose that Mr. Mulroney “received payments from GCI, Frank Moores, Fred Doucet, Gary Oullet…that [Mr. Mulroney] asked [Mr. Schreiber] through [his] lawyers to commit perjury, and that [Mr. Mulroney] supported fraud related to the Thyssen project.” He added, “This is my last warning.”

Parallel to his provincial appeals, Mr. Schreiber commenced an action in the Federal Court of Canada to have his extradition order set aside. The Federal Court threw out his case on June 11, 2007, because it ruled that his appeal was a “last gasp attempt to prevent the enforcement of the Minister’s Surrender [extradition] Order.” Having little success in the courts, and increasingly desperate to avoid extradition, Mr. Schreiber turned to his friends in the Liberal party, the CBC, and the Globe and Mail to help him with his get-out-of-jail card.

Mr. Schreiber should answer these questions:

“When he was in custody, which members of the media and the Liberals did he meet with when he was in custody, and when he was released from custody?”

“Did he give them any documents, and what were the contents of these documents?”

“Did any of these meetings contribute to his false affidavit of November 7, 2007?”

QUESTION #6
Mr. Schreiber’s original allegations concerning Airbus have been repudiated by successive investigations by the RCMP and most recently by Prof. Johnston. Mr. Schreiber’s allegations concerning the Harrington Lake meeting are contradicted by his own testimony. Mr. Schreiber’s claims to have mountains of evidence concerning payments to Canadian politicians have remained that, simply unsubstantiated, undocumented claims.

Mr. Schreiber has fought extradition to his native Germany for nine years making trying to make a fool of the Canadian justice system and most recently the Canadian parliament and it’s Commons Ethics Committee.

In his last appearance before the Committee, Mr. Schreiber was asked directly by the Chair whether “To the best of your knowledge and belief you have brought to the attention of this committee, all material matters related to the motion before us.” In a classic Schreiber response, he asserted that, “Yes” he had brought all material matters to the committee, but then added, “I think I can add more.”

Mr. Schreiber will today appear, hopefully for the final time, his history and his behavior begs one overarching question:

“What evidence has he not had the opportunity to produce? Why has he refused despite the Committee’s persistent demand to make public the material that he said he had stored in ‘safe places?’ And if he fails to offer such evidence, in light of the repudiation of each and every one of his previous allegations, what conceivable justification is there for a costly public inquiry?”

______

For a more detailed set of questions, click here.

BY E-MAIL AND BY FAX
(Original by courier)

Mr. Paul Szabo, M.P., Chair
c/o Mr. Richard Rumas, Clerk
STANDING COMMITTEE ON ACCESS TO INFORMATION,
PRIVACY AND ETHICS
Room 6-18
131 Queen Street
House of Commons
Ottawa, Ontario K1A 0A6

Re: Request for a Second Appearance of the Right Honourable Brian Mulroney before the Ethics Committee on February 28, 2008

Sir :

I acknowledge receipt of your letter of February 16, 2008, in which you requested confirmation of Mr. Mulroney’s appearance on Thursday, February 28, 2008 at 3:30 p.m., failing which the Ethics Committee might decide to issue a summons for his appearance.

I am puzzled by your threat as you have previously stated that the Committee would not force Mr. Mulroney to testify. Indeed, other members of your committee (such as Messrs. Thibault and Murphy) publicly stated that they would not seek a summons to compel my client’s testimony. Moreover, according to committee vice-chair, Mr. Pat Martin, you failed to consult with him or other committee members on this issue. In the February 20, 2008 edition of La Presse, Mr. Martin is quoted as saying:

“Le NPD détient la balance du pouvoir au comité, souligne le député de Winnipeg-Centre. Et nous avons décidé de ne pas appuyer un vote pour assigner M. Mulroney à comparaître de force ou pour l’obliger à nous remettre ses rapports d’impôt. ”

“Ce n’est pas parce que nous avons le pouvoir d’obliger l’ancien premier ministre à comparaître, poursuit M. Martin, que cela veut dire que nous devrions le faire. […]”

On CTV (February 19, 2008), Mr. Martin stated: “[…] That’s correct, unless [Mr. Mulroney] wants to come on the 28th to clarify something or to challenge other testimony we might have heard from witnesses. He’s welcome to. If he chooses not to, the committee will not have the NPD’s swing vote to force him to attend. And I believe that should conclude the work of the committee for the purposes of this study. I’d like to get on to other things like the access to information act which is the name of our committee.”

As is clear to all, Mr. Mulroney is the prime target of your inquiry. Before deciding whether to re-attend, Mr. Mulroney is entitled, as a matter of basic fairness, to know the specific allegations made against him and the specific provisions of the Parliament of Canada Act and/or of the Conflict of Interest and Post-Employment Code for Public Office Holders he is alleged to have violated. Yet, you have totally failed to provide Mr. Mulroney with this information. He is also entitled to know and consider all the evidence that has been put before your committee before deciding whether to re-attend. As Mr. Martin stated, it is up to Mr. Mulroney to decide whether it is necessary for him to re-attend in order “to clarify something or to challenge other testimony [the Ethics Committee] might have heard from witnesses.”

Obviously, a final decision on that score can only be made after the appearances of Messrs. Elmer MacKay and Karlheinz Schreiber scheduled on February 25, 2008. Thereafter, Mr. Mulroney will advise as to whether or not he will accept your invitation to attend on the 28th of February, 2008.

Yours truly,

BORDEN LADNER GERVAIS LLP

Guy J. Pratte
(Signed in his absence by Mtre Tommy Tremblay)
/mv

C.C.: Committee members: (by e-mail only)
Martin.Pat@parl.gc.ca (Pat Martin)
Tilson.D@parl.gc.ca (David Tilson)
Asselin.G@parl.gc.ca (Gérard Asselin)
Dhaliwal.S@parl.gc.ca (Sukh Dhaliwal)
Hubbard.C@parl.gc.ca (Charles Hubbard)
Pearson.G@parl.gc.ca (Glen Douglas Pearson)
Wallace.M@parl.gc.ca (Mike Wallace)
DelMastro.D@parl.gc.ca (Dean Del Mastro)
Hiebert.R@parl.gc.ca (Russ Hiebert)
Lavallee.C@parl.gc.ca (Carole Lavallée)
VanKesteren.D@parl.gc.ca (Dave Van Kesteren)