The House of Commons Ethics Committee is expected to officially end its investigation into the Mulroney-Schreiber affair this week.
Former prime minister Brian Mulroney has already said he feels vindicated and cleared of any wrongdoing.
In a letter to the committee on Wednesday, Guy Pratte, Mulroney's lawyer, said that three months of hearings did not produce "one iota of credible evidence" of illegal or unethical activities by Mulroney.
He also called the hearings partisan and unfair, and accused Karlheinz Schreiber, a German-born arms dealer currently fighting extradition to his native country on fraud and tax evasion charges, of manipulating the committee to stay in Canada.
Pratte also said in the letter that Mulroney no longer wants a public inquiry, despite calling for one in the past.
"Mr. Schreiber having completely failed to establish even a prima facie case of wrongdoing on Mr. Mulroney's part, despite five appearances before the Ethics Committee and the thousands of pages of documents he filed, is it really in the public interest to appoint a costly public Commission of inquiry in order to give Mr. Schreiber yet another chance to extend his stay in Canada?," Pratte wrote. "The only reasonable and fair answer to that question is 'No.'"
The committee has not yet made an official decision to warp up its probe, but is expected to do so as early as Thursday. Committee members said the probe would be difficult to continue because Mulroney has refused to make a second appearance.
"When he refused, we wanted to move on. We want the public inquiry to get under way," NDP committee member Joe Comartin told Â鶹´«Ã½net.
The committee could have issued a subpoena, forcing Mulroney to appear. But that prospect "is making a lot of members, even opposition members, uncomfortable," said CTV parliamentary correspondent Graham Richardson, "because he's a former prime minister and he has testified before them."
"The committee has realized that they were embarrassing themselves in front of the country and decided to end their hearings," Mulroney spokesperson Robin Sears told Â鶹´«Ã½net's Mike Duffy Live.
Calls for a broad public inquiry
The committee is now expected to write up its recommendations and issue a report for Parliament. Comartin said he and other committee members will press for a broad judicial inquiry into the matter, which Prime Minister Stephen Harper has said would be set up after the ethics committee had completed its work.
The ethics committee hearings began shortly after Harper announced last fall that he would appoint an independent third party to establish the parameters of a public inquiry into the so-called Mulroney-Schreiber affair.
The relationship between Schreiber, Mulroney, and top-level Canadian politicians, goes back to the 1980s. At the time, Schreiber helped push through the sale of European-made Airbus jets to Air Canada. There have been unproven suggestions that Schreiber paid kickbacks to Canadian politicians in an effort to get the sale through.
The RCMP investigated links between Mulroney and Schreiber in the 1990s and found no evidence of criminal wrongdoing. At one point, Mulroney sued the Government of Canada for libel and won a multi-million dollar settlement. During the suit Mulroney claimed that he barely knew Schreiber. He has since admitted that he had business dealings with Schreiber after leaving the Prime Minister's Office. Mulroney has said he accepted cash payments for legitimate work from Schreiber on at least three occasions in hotel rooms in the U.S. and Canada.
MPs had said the ethics committee hearings were an effort to get at matters that may not fall into the realm of a future inquiry into the Mulroney-Schreiber affair. But some critics said the committee's hearings had turned into a "circus," and that members were more interested in politically embarrassing sitting and past politicians than they were at getting at facts.
In addition to calling Schreiber, Mulroney, and some of their associates to testify, the committee also called on Mulroney's former cook for testimony. The cook offered little, if any, substantial information, and instead relayed his feelings of awe at Mulroney's lavish lifestyle.
Some legal analysts said politicians on the ethics committee were not equipped to conduct proper cross examinations. But some proponents of the ethics committee's probe said it could have been a valuable tool to help Canadians get answers to questions that a public inquiry may not focus on.
There is speculation that legal scholar David Johnston -- the man appointed by Harper to set the limits of an inquiry -- has called for a probe with a limited mandate.
In a report given to Harper earlier this year, Johnston apparently proposed the mandate of the public inquiry to focus on what transpired after a June 23, 1993, meeting between Schreiber and Mulroney at the prime minister's official summer residence at Harrington Lake, Que. The meeting was held two days before Mulroney stepped down as prime minister.
Schreiber claims Mulroney agreed at the Harrington Lake meeting to help lobby the Kim Campbell government to support Schreiber's plan to set up a light-armored vehicle plant in Cape Breton.
Schreiber claims he later gave Mulroney $300,000 in cash payments for his lobbying activities, including $100,000 in August, 1993 when Mulroney was still a Member of Parliament. He alleges Mulroney did not do any work for the money.
Mulroney has denied any wrong doing, and none of the allegations against him has been proven in court.
Mulroney testified before the ethics committee in December that he was only paid $225,000 in cash and maintains he did legitimate work for Schreiber, including lobbying world leaders to buy the armored vehicles for UN peacekeeping missions. Mulroney has admitted he did not pay tax on the $225,000 until 1999 when he learned Schreiber had been charged in Germany for bribery, fraud, forgery and tax evasion.
The former prime minister apologized before the committee for accepting cash payments, saying it was a "serious error in judgment."
