OTTAWA - The Conservative government spent a second consecutive day declining to answer questions about a controversy involving cash payments to former prime minister Brian Mulroney.
The Tories refused again Thursday to say whether any of their ministers have asked to learn more about the Airbus affair or the cash payments made to Mulroney in hotel rooms.
Ten-month-old documents released under the Access to Information Act reveal that the federal bureaucracy produced briefing material on Mulroney, but that it was not read by the current or former justice minister.
Justice Minister Rob Nicholson's office has refused to respond to these questions: Has the minister since asked to see the briefing material, and why or why not? The Tories are under opposition pressure to re-examine the $2.1 million, out-of-court libel settlement paid to Mulroney by the previous Liberal government.
"Currently in a meeting right now, trying to get answers to your questions,'' Nicholson spokesman Darren Eke wrote in an e-mail on Wednesday.
He did not elaborate and his office did not respond to a number of subsequent e-mails and voice messages left Wednesday and Thursday.
The Liberals say there's a clear motive for passing up on the briefings: the Tories can claim ignorance of the file, and can avoid taking action against a former Conservative prime minister.
Mulroney had sued the government for libel after the RCMP alleged in a letter that he was under investigation in a kickback scheme involving the federal purchase of Airbus planes.
The ex-prime minister has never been charged, has always maintained his innocence, and he received a settlement from the federal government to cover his legal fees in 1997.
But a former aide to Jean Chretien says the Liberal government of the day would never have settled with Mulroney if it had known the extent of his dealings with Karlheinz Schreiber.
It has since been revealed that Mulroney met with the German-Canadian businessman on three occasions soon after leaving office, and accepted $300,000 in cash payments.
It has also been reported that Mulroney did not initially declare the revenue on his income taxes, but eventually did in a subsequent tax year.
He has said the payments were to help Schreiber start a pasta business. Schreiber has scoffed at his version of the events.
Prime Minister Stephen Harper has refused to discuss the possibility of recovering the money and calls the $300,000 transaction a deal between two private citizens.
Soon after the Conservatives took office last year, the government closed an internal investigation into whether the Mulroney settlement should be reconsidered.
The Justice Department produced briefing material that, according to access documents, was never read by Nicholson or his predecessor Vic Toews.
One version of that unread briefing material -- also obtained under access -- concludes on the following note:
"The government's settlement with Mr. Mulroney is governed by Quebec law which provides that a settlement is a contract that may be set aside on the same grounds as any other contract. One such ground (is) where one party to the contract committed fraud on the other.''
That passage was blacked out in one version of the documents but was included in another, less heavily-edited version released to The Canadian Press.
At the end of the day Thursday, the Conservatives arranged for a Justice Department civil servant to respond to the question of whether Nicholson had sought a briefing.
The departmental official declared that he could not confirm or deny whether the minister had requested a briefing, because it's a matter of lawyer-client privilege.
Tory staff would not even discuss their awareness of documents that were produced last year by the Justice Department.
But they were quick to repeat Prime Minister Stephen Harper's "challenge'' that the previous Liberal government release its own decade-old cabinet documents on Airbus.
