Gomery likens ad deal to money laundering
By DANIEL LEBLANC
From Saturday's Globe and Mail E-mail this Article
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Former Chrétien aide admits to hiding sponsorship deal
Mr. Justice John Gomery yesterday slammed a $125,000 sponsorship deal that was funnelled through a Crown corporation in 2000, saying it was akin to a criminal operation.
“If this was about drugs, we'd call it money laundering. Don't you agree?” Judge Gomery asked Jean Carle, the long-time right-hand man to former prime minister Jean Chrétien.
Pressed by the judge, Mr. Carle grudgingly agreed with the analogy about the deal he had overseen as a vice-president at the Business Development Bank.
“You're not wrong,” Mr. Carle said.
After the hearings, Mr. Carle's lawyer nonetheless criticized the remark as an “inappropriate use of words by the judge.”
The verbal jousting capped a hectic week for the sponsorship inquiry in which Judge Gomery was forced to apologize for comments he had made in media interviews last year.
Still, he did not back off from his criticism of the 2000 deal in which the Business Development Bank of Canada agreed to issue a cheque to television producer Robert Scully on behalf of Public Works Canada.
The deal was struck because the government owed Mr. Scully's company $125,000 for work it did on a television series.
Mr. Carle testified that he talked to Pierre Tremblay, the lead bureaucrat on the sponsorship program, who told him that Public Works had already given a lot of funding that year to Mr. Scully's company and he didn't want the company's name to appear again on its list of approved sponsorships.
Mr. Carle said Mr. Tremblay, who has since died, asked him whether the BDC could pay the amount to L'Information Essentielle, and that Public Works would reimburse the BDC.
Mr. Carle told the inquiry that it was a good deal for the BDC, which received additional advertising on Mr. Scully's television series as a result.
The paperwork was then put in place to make the deal happen, providing in passing a commission of $15,000 to an advertising firm that transferred the cheque from Public Works to the BDC.
Officials at the BDC have previously testified that they had been told at the time to issue the cheque to L'Information Essentielle to fix an accounting mistake.
But Judge Gomery said that in reality, the deal was set up in such a way that the BDC helped the federal government “camouflage” its funding to L'Information Essentielle.
“You collaborated with Mr. Tremblay to falsify the situation, didn't you?” Judge Gomery said.
Mr. Carle rejected the judge's allegation, saying the BDC acted in good faith as a “transmission belt.”
“It wasn't to hide anything. It was Mr. Tremblay who did not want it in its books,” Mr. Carle said.
On another matter, a document tabled at the inquiry said that Mr. Carle submitted a claim for a $382 taxi ride in 1998 to go to a chalet in the Laurentians owned by advertising executive Jean Lafleur.
Mr. Carle said that he and his wife attended the reception along with then-minister Martin Cauchon and the then-president of Canada Post, Andre Ouellet, among others.
Mr. Carle submitted a claim to the BDC for the taxi trip, which Mr. Carle's lawyer said was approved by president of the BDC.
Mr. Carle was the director of operations in the office of Mr. Chrétien from late 1993 to early 1998, where he earned a reputation as a no-nonsense tough guy.
Mr. Carle said he had nothing to do with the management of the sponsorship program in those days, but that he sometimes received lists of events that were being funded.
Mr. Carle, who was responsible for Mr. Chrétien's schedule, said he sometimes arranged for the then-prime-minister to travel to some of the sponsored events.
“It was purely a logistical issue,” Mr. Carle said.
Earlier in the day, former minister Alfonso Gagliano told the inquiry that he is now unemployable because of his perceived role in the sponsorship scandal, adding that his two decades in Ottawa have left him worse-off financially than had he stayed out of politics.
Mr. Gagliano, who is also the former ambassador to Denmark, said the media have “had fun” with him for years, but that he is still suffering.
He said that those who think the sponsorship program was used to pay off donors to the Liberal Party have got it wrong.
“Everybody who worked for the Liberal Party, whether on an election campaign or outside an election campaign, was paid by the Liberal Party,” the former Liberal minister told reporters after three days of testimony at the Gomery inquiry.
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