Wednesday, November 14, 2007

Mulroney's Real Fight is With Himself


Brian Mulroney is talking tough again.

Speaking at a fundraiser in Toronto he proclaimed, "Twelve years ago I was falsely accused. I fought and I won. Now it seems I'm going to have to fight again. I'm not pleased by this, but so be it. I am going to fight and win again."

Just who is he planning to fight? He doesn't need to fight, merely to give believable explanations to a number of facts that he admits or that are in the public record.

Karlheinz Schreiber has tossed out a number of allegations, some of them barely more than innuendo. If Mulroney will simply clarify a few of the troubling inconsistencies, Schreiber's claims will become irrelevant to all but the real conspiracy theorists.

He needs to explain why he took cash-stuffed envelopes at three meetings with Schreiber. Why cash and what was it for?

He needs to explain how he handled the money. Just what did he do with it?

He needs to explain how he treated the money for tax purposes. Was it Schreiber's money that led to his (and Frank Moores') voluntary disclosures to Revenue Canada after the story was broken in the Canadian media?

He needs to explain the evidence he gave, under oath, in the course of his lawsuit suggesting that his only involvement with Schreiber was to have a coffee with the guy a few times.

These four issues are the core of the problem. Explain them, if there is an explanation, and the problem pretty much goes away. If he tries to avoid these issues, Mulroney's real fight will be with himself.

1 comment:

Lord Kitchener's Own said...

I'd be satisfied if he could give an explanation to just number one. WHAT WAS THE CASH FOR??? That's all I really care about.

If the money was legit, I don't care what he did with it. The seeming (attempted) tax evasion is bad and all, but technically I'm not sure it was illegal (the whole point of the voluntary disclosures is to allow people to claim money that they should have claimed earlier, after the fact, and so long as Revenue Canada isn't investigating you, it's not a problem to use the disclosures for that purpose) and I don't really care much about it. As for his testimony, frankly, no one ever asked him the question. Could he have been more forthright about his relationship with Shreiber? Absolutely. But he's not required to volunteer information no one ever asks about. That said, the notion that he was paid $300,000 in cash for some as yet unexplained service, and yet he barely ever met with the guy paying for the service (except to pick up the cash) seems, at the least, odd. But I don't really care about that.

What did you do to earn the money, and why was it paid in cash with no paper trail? He's got to give a satisfactory answer to that. If he can (and I'm sceptical that he can) the rest is just window dressing, imho.