Airbus investigative reporting was heroic indeed

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This article was published 01/05/2010 (5817 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The Truth Shows Up

A Reporter’s Fifteen-Year Odyssey Tracking Down the Truth about Mulroney, Schreiber and the Airbus Scandal

By Harvey Cashore

Key Porter, 536 pages, $35

Canadians don’t make heroes out of investigative journalists.

In the United States, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein became household names by digging up Watergate details, writing the bestselling All the President’s Men and seeing Dustin Hoffman and Robert Redford portray them on screen.

In Canada, journalists like Daniel Leblanc, the Globe and Mail reporter who uncovered the federal sponsorship scandal, are largely unknown.

Harvey Cashore is a charter member of this hard-slogging group. For 15 years, most of it with CBC’s the fifth estate, Cashore doggedly pursued the Airbus story — Canada’s longest-running political scandal, which has stretched from efforts to dump Joe Clark as Conservative leader in the early 1980s to today, touching every federal government in between.

The Airbus story has everything — clandestine meetings, shadowy sources, Swiss bank accounts, political intrigue, briefcases stuffed with cash, lawsuits, threats, cover-ups, even the odd car chase, all of it involving some of the most powerful and connected people in Canada and Germany.

In The Truth Shows Up, Cashore tells his own tale of how it took a journalist to get to the heart of a story that ended with former prime minister Brian Mulroney on the witness stand, explaining why he was in Montreal and New York hotel rooms taking envelopes stuffed with thousand-dollar bills from Karlheinz Schreiber, a dispenser of schmiergelder, better known as bribes.

The core of the Airbus affair is the allegation that European aircraft maker Airbus Industries paid bribes to seal a deal to sell 34 airplanes to Air Canada in 1988, and that Mulroney was one of the recipients.

Cashore’s approach has been classic Woodward and Bernstein — follow the money.

His work established that Airbus paid millions in secret commissions, that money was transferred through a Lichtenstein shell company to Swiss bank accounts set up by Schreiber, that one account was code-named "Britan" and that three cash withdrawals were made totalling $300,000 in 1993 and 1994.

After years of denying any dealings with Schreiber, Mulroney admitted taking three cash payments totalling $225,000 in 1993 and 1994 (Schreiber says it was $300,000).

Still, it took another revelation by the fifth estate and The Globe and Mail — that Mulroney did not pay taxes on the money when he received it, but waited six years to declare it to the Canada Revenue Agency — to stir action.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper set up an inquiry in 2007 under Manitoba jurist Jeffrey Oliphant. The commission’s report will be released May 31. Mulroney testified to getting the cash, but denied any wrongdoing, including tax evasion or accepting kickbacks

The inquiry was long overdue, in Cashore’s opinion. Time and again as he pursued the story he wondered why the fifth estate‘s revelations did not trigger more public outrage and more demands to know what really happened.

Instead there was a massive campaign of denial by Mulroney and his supporters, a lawsuit against the Liberal government of Jean Chrétien that cost taxpayers $2.1 million, Mulroney blustering over tarnishing his father’s good name and constant assertions that nothing improper happened.

But the truth came out, one fact at time. In the end, Schreiber himself provided significant evidence as he tried to buy time to avoid deportation to Germany on charges of bribery and tax evasion. He is currently on trial there.

Above all, Cashore’s book is a story about how good investigative journalism works — endless amounts of meticulous research, sources coaxed from the shadows, strokes of luck and perseverance in the face of lawsuits, public attacks, official silence, even the disdain of other journalists who simply did not believe the story.

It’s a world that Canadians would do well to understand better. Then maybe we’d have a few more Woodward and Bernsteins here.

Bob Cox is publisher of the Winnipeg Free Press.