Believe Grit or not
Calgary Sun
Ex-PM Jean Chretien, you’ll recall, testified before Justice John Gomery’s AdScam inquiry that he didn’t know about any wrongdoing in the federal sponsorship program he created.
Well, if the stunning testimony by former Groupaction Marketing president Jean Brault — released by Gomery Thursday — is to be believed, there were many things Jean Chretien didn’t know:
• Jean Chretien didn’t know that Brault, who has ties to the Chretien family going back almost 30 years, kicked back more than $1 million to the Liberal party over nine years in return for at least $40 million in sponsorship contracts alone.
• Jean Chretien didn’t know that one of the key players through whom these secret payments were made was Jacques Corriveau, a longtime Chretien crony and a key member of his leadership campaigns.
• Jean Chretien didn’t know that Brault paid Corriveau’s firm hundreds of thousands of dollars for doing nothing — money which Brault understood was destined for the Liberal party.
• Jean Chretien didn’t know that his older brother, Gabriel (Gaby) Chretien, to whom he is extremely close, conspired with Brault to obscure a paper trail linking the Liberal party to the sponsorship scandal. (Brault said he and Chretien’s brother agreed Brault would disguise a $4,000 donation to the Liberals as a payment to Gaby through a phoney invoice.)
• Jean Chretien didn’t know that his own niece, who had previously worked at Corriveau’s firm, was one of the people Corriveau strong-armed Brault into hiring at Groupaction.
• Jean Chretien didn’t know Corriveau also pressured Brault into hiring Liberal partisans who actually did full-time work for the Liberals while being paid by Groupaction.
• Jean Chretien didn’t know that another prominent individual through whom Groupaction funnelled cash to the Liberal party was Benoit Corbeil, president of the Liberal party’s Quebec wing in the 1990s and a confidant of Corriveau’s.
• Jean Chretien didn’t know his top adviser, Jacques Corriveau, was paid $430,000 by Brault for work that was billed but never performed by Corriveau’s company, Pluri-Design.
Moving on from Chretien, Alfonso Gagliano — Chretien’s public works minister, and thus responsible for the sponsorship program — also testified that he didn’t know of any wrongdoing.
Gagliano didn’t know that Brault funnelled tens of thousands of dollars to the Liberals through Joseph Morselli, a confidant of Gagliano’s.
Nor did he know that Brault and Morselli met at a Montreal restaurant where Brault put $5,000 on the table in an envelope, went to the bathroom, and returned to find the money was gone.
Nor did he know Brault delivered an envelope stuffed with $25,000 in cash to Morselli at Gagliano’s fundraising dinner.
In total, Brault says he doled out $100,000 in cash to Morselli, supposedly to help the provincial arm of the federal Liberals.
Nor did he know top Quebec Liberals also pushed Brault to pay $84,000 to Liberal staffer Serge Gosselin, who Brault said never worked at Groupaction. Commission lawyers say Gosselin was working on a book on Gagliano while on Brault’s payroll.
“We were very heavily solicited,” Brault recalled April 1 under questioning from lead inquiry counsel Bernard Roy.
“We didn’t ask questions and we understood that all contributions were going to be taken into consideration and that we would be compensated (for it) one way or another.”
Finally, Prime Minister Paul Martin testified he didn’t know of any wrongdoing in the sponsorship program either, despite being Chretien’s finance minister and the senior minister from Quebec.
This is what the Liberals are asking us to believe.
Unbelievable.
