Jeffrey Oliphant's Herculean Chore

Stephen Harper as Eurystheus. Brian Mulroney as the sly King Augeas. Jeffrey Oliphant as Hercules, charged by Eurystheus to clean the stables befouled by Augeas' cattle.

Oliphant's task is Herculean. He has to listen to one of the most powerful prime ministers in Canadian history describe a course of shady dealings and then decide how much of what he hears can be believed. He has a lot of crap to shovel his way through. It's dirty and it smells.

Nobody can avoid noticing how furiously Mulroney, under examination by inquiry counsel, is spinning his evidence. Time after time when asked a direct, simple question, Mulroney uses it as an opportunity to slip into a repetitive churning over of facts and allegations that he claims exonerate him of all wrongdoing. It's positively tiresome. It's as though he's waving his arms at Oliphant and yelling, "no, don't look over there, look over here, over here."

I think Mulroney has tripped himself up over his account of how he treated the cash, or at least as much of it as he admits having received from Schreiber.

If there's one thing that fledgling lawyers have drummed into their pointy little heads, it's the concept of trusts and retainers. Clients are normally required to give counsel money in the form of retainers, essentially security against fees and expenses to be incurred. Lawyers have to treat those retainers according to very specific rules. Those rules govern how the money is received, how it is held and how it is eventually disbursed and accounted for to the client.

Mulroney couldn't give a straight answer about how he received, how he held or how he disbursed the Schreiber money. His tax lawyer told the Canadian Revenue Agency in his 'voluntary disclosure' that the money was earned by Mulroney in 1993, 1994 and 1995. However that's not what Mulroney told Oliphant.

Mulroney's version is that the retainer was an ongoing matter until 1998, the last year he did any work for Schreiber, apparently on some pasta project. It was only when Schreiber was charged in Germany with tax evasion that Mulroney ended the retainer at which point he took his payment, i.e. all the money. Mulroney insisted that, prior to that point, he didn't touch the money because it wasn't his.

The inquiry counsel, Richard Wolson, asked a telling question. Why, if Mulroney believed he hadn't earned the income until 1999, didn't he just declare it as income in that year instead of retaining a senior tax lawyer to tell the tax authorities that it was undeclared income from 1993 to 1995? Mulroney almost suggested that his tax lawyer simply made up the timing of the income in his voluntary disclosure.

This is a glaring inconsistency that Oliphant is going to have to resolve. He's going to have to make some interesting findings on questions of credibility.

In the greater scheme of things, how Mulroney dealt with the taxes on his Schreiber money may appear inconsequential but this is a case full of undocumented agreements, dead witnesses, false statements, inconsistencies and conflicting claims. To sort through that Oliphant is going to have to read tea leaves, the indirect evidence. You have to weigh how witnesses performed under questioning. Where they forthright and candid or were they evasive and incredible? You look at what is clear from whatever hard evidence you do have, what is unclear or inconsistent and what is missing that ought to be there. That is what Mr. Wolson has been doing, putting together a picture piece by piece. He doesn't have any real smoking gun here. This is going to come down to questions of credibility and, as far as I can tell, on that score Mulroney has done himself no favours.