Media/journalistic Coverage
Journalist Stevie Cameron wrote about the Airbus scandal, and Schreiber's links to the Mulroney government, in her 1994 best-selling book On the Take: Crime, Corruption and Greed in the Mulroney Years. CBC's The Fifth Estate produced a documentary in March 1995 which revealed, for the first time, a secret side agreement between Airbus Industrie and a Liechtenstein shell company, International Aircraft Leasing, or IAL. The fifth estate reported that IAL received millions of dollars in secret commissions after the sale of Airbus aircraft to Air Canada in 1988. William Kaplan responded to Cameron and the CBC programme in his 1998 book Presumed Guilty, criticizing journalists for the paucity of evidence. Then, in October 1999, CBC's the fifth estate obtained new Swiss Bank Corporation records which revealed that Karlheinz Schreiber had set up a secret bank account in Zurich with the code-name "Britan". The fifth estate programme revealed there had been three cash withdrawals out of the account, in 1993 and 1994, for a total of $300,000. Two years later, in 2001, Stevie Cameron and fifth estate producer Harvey Cashore, wrote a book about Karlheinz Schreiber The Last Amigo. In 2004, William Kaplan clarified his position in a further book A Secret Trial, by criticizing Cameron for her role as a confidential RCMP informant on the Airbus matter, and Mulroney for not disclosing the fact that he had received the $300,000 from Schreiber.
On February 8, 2006, The Fifth Estate reported that the $300,000 payment came through a Swiss bank account code-named "BRITAN" from another named "Frankfurt", linked with the Airbus affair. Karlheinz Schreiber said in an interview with the program that the money came at the request of a Mulroney aide, who told Schreiber the former prime minister was short of funds. Schreiber mocked Mulroney's claim that the money was a consulting fee for help given in a pasta business Schreiber had invested in. The programme also reported there was no evidence that Mulroney knew of the source of the funds.
On October 31, 2007 The Globe and Mail and The Fifth Estate reported new information about the cash transactions between Schreiber and Mulroney, revealing that Brian Mulroney filed a Voluntary Disclosure with Revenue Canada several years after accepting the cash envelopes from Karlheinz Schreiber.
Read more about this topic: Airbus Affair
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“The question confronting the Church today is not any longer whether the man in the street can grasp a religious message, but how to employ the communications media so as to let him have the full impact of the Gospel message.”
—Pope John Paul II (b. 1920)