Karlheinz Schreiber, a former West German intelligence officer, lobbyist, arms dealer and political fundraiser, used a parliamentary committee hearing on Tuesday to support his onetime ally, former prime minister Brian Mulroney.
The House of Commons ethics committee summoned Schreiber, a German-Canadian citizen, in handcuffs from a jail where he was awaiting extradition to Germany on charges of tax evasion, fraud and bribery. It wanted an explanation for why he paid Mulroney, a Conservative, C$300,000 (US$296,000) in cash at a series of hotel room meetings beginning in 1993.
Mulroney has acknowledged the payments, but has said they were for helping Schreiber set up a pasta business in Ontario and an armored vehicle factory in Quebec, neither of which materialized. Mulroney is also expected to testify.
While Schreiber confirmed that he wanted Mulroney to help with the military vehicle project, he rejected the pasta business explanation on Tuesday, as well as widespread suggestions that the payments were related to the purchase of Airbus jets by Air Canada during Mulroney's tenure, a sale Schreiber helped to broker.
Schreiber said he was summoned to a meeting in June 1993 with Mulroney, two days before he stepped down as prime minister. Schreiber said Mulroney offered to lobby the government that he predicted would be formed by his successor, Kim Campbell.
CONDITIONS: The Russian president said a deal that was scuppered by ‘elites’ in the US and Europe should be revived, as Ukraine was generally satisfied with it Russian President Vladimir Putin yesterday said that he was ready for talks with Ukraine, after having previously rebuffed the idea of negotiations while Kyiv’s offensive into the Kursk region was ongoing. Ukraine last month launched a cross-border incursion into Russia’s Kursk region, sending thousands of troops across the border and seizing several villages. Putin said shortly after there could be no talk of negotiations. Speaking at a question and answer session at Russia’s Eastern Economic Forum in Vladivostok, Putin said that Russia was ready for talks, but on the basis of an aborted deal between Moscow’s and Kyiv’s negotiators reached in Istanbul, Turkey,
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Four days after last scanning in for work, a 60-year-old office worker in Arizona was found dead in a cubicle at her workplace, having never left the building during that time, authorities said. Denise Prudhomme, who worked at a Wells Fargo corporate office, was found dead in a third-floor cubicle on Aug. 20, Tempe police said. She had last scanned into the building on Aug. 16 at 7am, police said. There was no indication she scanned out of the building after that. Prudhomme worked in an underpopulated area of the building. Her cause of death had not been determined, but police said the preliminary
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