Friday, April 18, 2008

Police arrest Liberal in relation to Sponsorship investigation

It must be hard for the RCMP to keep track of which of the Conservatives or Liberals they are pursuing from day to day.

If its Friday, it must be the Liberals ... and the $49 million or so that is still owed to Canadians from their Sponsorship scandal.

This afternoon, the former director general of the Liberal Party of Canada in Quebec, Benoit Corbeil was taken off the streets on charges including fraud.

Ever wonder what happened to your Sponsorship favourites? Most are right where you left them:

Jean Brault: sentenced to 30 months in jail for the five fraud charges he pleaded guilty to.
Chuck Guité: sentenced to 42 months in jail for five fraud charges.
Jean Lafleur: sentenced to 42 months in jail in addition to the time served in jail since April 3, 2007. Ordered to pay restitution of $1.56 million to the government and an additional $500 for each of 28 counts of fraud.

The trial to recover public funds from the others is scheduled to begin this fall.

Sick of Liberal and Conservative scandals giving public service a bad name? So are Jack Layton and the NDP.

UPDATE: As noted here, the arrest was related to the Sponsorship investigation, but the charges appear to be separate. Title changed to reflect that.

3 comments:

JimBobby said...

Whooee! This guy's a former Liberal bigwig and he's an alleged crook. He was implicated in AdScam. The charges laid today, however, do not seem to be related in any way to the Sponsorship Scandal. I am pointing this out because your post's title says he was arrested on Sponsorship charges. In fact, the big money part of the charges against Corbeil are for defrauding the Liberal Party of $100,000 by way of fraudulent invoices. He's also charged with influence peddling wrt a real estate deal; again, not AdScam related.

I got all my info from the article to which you've linked, btw.

JB

ch said...

Thanks, jimbobby. I noticed that too. I wonder why he wasn't charged with anything to do with the sponsorship scandal, as I thought he was involved. Maybe these will be coming later.

RCMP Cpl. Luc Bessette said the charges are not directly linked to the sponsorship scandal, but come from a parallel investigation.

Blogging Horse said...

Odd. Some media sources, like Canwest's David Akin are saying "the RCMP made another arrest in connection with the four-year-old investigation into the sponsorship scandal".

So, the charges are connected to the investigation, but may not have been directly related to sponsorship. Noted, thanks.

The plot deepens.