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WEDNESDAY FEBRUARY 8, 2006 | Bookmark this page | E-mail to a friend |
(43:00)
Karlheinz
Schreiber told the fifth estate that he gave Brian
Mulroney $300,000 after Mulroney stepped
down as Prime Minister."Did you maintain contact with Mr. Schreiber after you ceased being Prime Minister?" Sheppard asked.
Mulroney replied, "Well, from time to time, not very often. When he was going through Montreal, he would give me a call. We would have a cup of coffee, I think, once or twice."
Mulroney elaborated, "when he's on his way to Montreal,
he called me and asked me and I say perhaps once or twice, if I
could come to a cup…have a cup of coffee, with him at a hotel.
I think I had one in the Queen Elizabeth Hotel with him. I had one
in the coffee bar at the Queen Elizabeth Hotel."
(Listen
to the April 17 testimony 
9:06
or read the court transcript .pdf
file)
(read more
of Sheppard's interview with the
fifth estate)
Brian
Mulroney and Karlheinz Schreiber in Germany with then-Chancellor
Helmut Kohl.Mulroney also did not mention a meeting in New York city where Schreiber gave him another envelope filled with money. He also did not mention a meeting he had with Schreiber at Harrington Lake, Quebec, just days after he resigned as Prime Minister.
Later in his examination Sheppard asks Mulroney "the Canadian government alleges that very substantial sums were paid to Mr. Schreiber by Airbus Industrie, and you didn't discuss with Mr. Schreiber whether it was true or not?"
Mulroney responded by saying, "what preoccupied me, inasmuch
as I had never heard of the Airbus matter in my life, what preoccupied
me, were the extraordinary falsehoods and injustices that involve
me…and the fact that Mr. Schreiber may or may not have had
any business dealings was not my principal…my principal preoccupation.
I had never had any dealings with him."
"Well, I've never been to his home," said Schreiber. "He has never been to my home. We met in his office, at a building – at a restaurant or in a club or what, when he was with others."
When William Kaplan interviewed Brian Mulroney in 1997 for Presumed Guilty, his first book on the Airbus affair, Mulroney said his relationship with Schreiber was minimal.
"I knew Schreiber in a peripheral way," said Mulroney. "He was associated in my mind with the Alberta Progressive Conservatives. That was the limited extent to which I knew anything about him. I knew who he was, and that he had been involved in Bear Head."
Mulroney spokesperson Luc Lavoie said in 1999 in a taped phone conversation with the fifth estate it was a myth that Mulroney and Schreiber were friends. (visit the media page to listen to clips of Lavoie's conversations with fifth estate producer Harvey Cashore)
"They were not close. They were never close," said Lavoie. "Actually, they were not - it would be totally wrong to describe them as friends. Because they were not friends. They were acquaintances who had learned to know one another through this project that he was pushing using any means available."
Karlheinz
Schreiber and Brian Mulroney.