Clearing the Air

"I will cooperate fully with the person appointed"

And so he should. Brian Mulroney has given his word to cooperate fully in sorting out the truth of his dealings with Karheinz Schreiber. Mulroney, pictured above with Schreiber and another of Schreiber's victims, Helmut Kohl, needs to explain how he came to receive cash payments totalling some $300,000 from Schreiber, what that money was for, how it was handled and the curious manner in which the former PM seems to have treated it for tax purposes.

Mulroney has long said he wanted to clear the air on this one and now's his chance. Schreiber could be just making up some of his allegations but no one has proven them false yet and some of them, such as the money involved, various meetings between Schreiber and Mulroney and so on have been acknowledged.

This could be one of those situations where nothing technically wrong happened but the optics are terrible. I think that would be a "best case" outcome for Mulroney.

Harper, having backed down on looking into this at all, now has to take great care to ensure the person he appoints to conduct the enquiry is genuinely independent and not just a reliable stooge.

I personally am looking forward to learning about the involvement in all of this of former Tory premier turned lobbyist, the late Frank Moores. It seems Moores also got a hunk of the Airbus schmeergelder, $300,000 in fact and, like Mulroney, he also seems to have raced off to make a voluntary disclosure of the "income" after bank records showing the payments became public knowledge.

Wonder if Stevie Cameron is stocking up on pens.

Check out her blog at http://steviecameronblog.blogspot.com/ You'll find some intriguing stuff there. Among the interesting tidbits is an account of a refrigerator-sized safe Mulroney kept in the basement of 24 Sussex Drive and the cash that found its way there. She quotes the Mulroneys' chef, Francois Martin, who also acted as household manager as saying, "Cash came in like it was falling from the sky."