The Lobbyist Who Never Was

Brian Mulroney was in a spot. He needed to explain why he received cash-stuffed envelopes from Karlheinz Schreiber, money about which he kept very quiet until Schreiber's bank records became public sending Mulroney racing off to Revenue Canada to file a belated, "voluntary disclosure."

The answer? He was retained by Schreiber to lobby foreign governments on behalf of Schreiber's German customers, outfits like Thyssen. Now you would have expected that Thyssen would be delighted to have a former Canadian prime minister working to flog its products to new customers and it might have - if it had ever known about it. But, it seems, this was a secret Mulroney kept from everyone, even the companies he was supposedly earning hundreds of thousands of dollars to promote. From the Globe & Mail:

"In interviews with The Globe and Mail and CBC, a former Thyssen executive and a spokeswoman for the company, which has changed names after merging with another company in 1999, said they are not aware of the lobbying that the former prime minister says he did for Thyssen in China, Russia and France between 1993 and 1994.

"He never worked for Thyssen," Winfried Haastert, a former Thyssen executive, said in a phone interview.

"I cannot imagine how he could expect to sell something like this to Russia or even to China. It's absolute nonsense. Maybe he tried to support us. I don't know."

Anja Gerber, a spokeswoman for ThyssenKrupp Technologies, also said that Mr. Mulroney had "no official business with Thyssen."

So that means that there's just one person who can substantiate Mulroney's bizarre claims - Karlheinz Schreiber - who vociferously disputes Mulroney's story.