Former prime minister Brian Mulroney, right, waits to be questioned by lead commission counsel Richard Wolson at the Oliphant Commission in Ottawa on Tuesday. (Sean Kilpatrick/Canadian Press)Former prime minister Brian Mulroney admitted Tuesday he did not want author William Kaplan to go public with information that he had a business relationship with Karlheinz Schreiber, but denied he called him specifically to ask him to keep the information quiet.
At the Oliphant inquiry in Ottawa, lead inquiry counsel Richard Wolson spent Tuesday morning questioning Mulroney about Kaplan, his Globe and Mail articles about Mulroney and Schreiber and what Kaplan wrote in his book: A Secret Trial, Brian Mulroney, Stevie Cameron and the Public Trust.
Kaplan had interviewed Mulroney for three articles he wrote for the Globe and Mail in 2003, in which Kaplan revealed that Mulroney had received $300,000 in cash payments from Schreiber, a German-Canadian businessman. But Kaplan, writing in A Secret Trial, suggested Mulroney tried to pressure him not to include that information.
“Mulroney’s unrelenting campaign to persuade me not to publish the story about the money for one reason only, to protect his reputation, was brutal, heavy-handed, and extremely wearing,” Kaplan wrote.
Mulroney told Wolson that he had tried to persuade Kaplan not to include that information in his articles because he was concerned that some in the media would use the information, in the context of the Airbus affair, “to try and get back at me and me and my family again.”
“Did you call him attempting to convince him not to write about the legal, commercial relationship that you had with Mr. Schreiber?” Wolson asked.
“I have no recollection of calling him for that specific objective,” Mulroney said.
“He would call me from time to time. When I had a chance, I would call him. Various subjects in which he was interested would come up in various conversations about his book and the areas of interest he wanted to talk about and obviously this was one of them.”
In his book Presumed Guilty: Brian Mulroney, the Airbus Affair, and the Government of Canada, Kaplan wrote that Mulroney had unfairly been the victim of unfounded allegations that he had received kickbacks from the sale of Airbus airplanes to Air Canada. Mulroney, who sued the federal government for libel after the allegations were leaked, received a $2.1-million settlement.
But in his second book about Mulroney, Kaplan criticized the former prime minister for not being forthcoming with him about his relationship with Schreiber.
The Oliphant inquiry is looking into three cash payments Mulroney received from Schreiber at three hotels in Montreal and New York from 1993 to 1994.
Schreiber has said he paid Mulroney $300,000 to lobby domestically on behalf of the Bear Head project вЂ" a plan to establish a light armoured vehicle plant in Canada.
But Mulroney has said he was paid $225,000 in three instalments and that the money was payment for his efforts to promote the vehicles internationally on behalf of the German company Thyssen. He has denied it was for any domestic lobbying work, which would have violated domestic lobbying rules.
