You have to dig deep to find the tiny sentence buried within the story which is itself on page twenty-one (21!) of the Globe and Mail: Maurice Strong “…a friend and former mentor to Prime Minister Paul Martin”.
Of course he was (is still?) a life-long Liberal Party fund-raiser and advisor and former special assistant to Paul Martin’s father, Paul Martin Sr. Our Prime Minister is “Junior”. In fact let’s call him that henceforth.
They describe Strong as “a prominent Canadian businessman”, but in actual fact, he was better known as a prominent Liberal Party man.
Time (Canada) magazine described his as follows:
…peripatetic international civil servant Maurice Strong, one of the apostles of global environmentalism. “Paul will be one of the best-prepared Prime Ministers Canada has ever seen,” promises Strong, a family friend who gave Martin his first job in Montreal’s Power Corp.
But the Globe and Mail misses the point, on purpose, I suspect.
Strong took tainted cheque, inquiry finds
NEW YORK—Prominent Canadian businessman Maurice Strong accepted a personal cheque for nearly $1-million (U.S.) that was drawn on a Jordanian bank and came from a controversial international businessman who was working closely with the Iraqi regime, an inquiry into the UN’s scandal-ridden oil-for-food program has found.
The committee concluded there was no “direct evidence” that Mr. Strong knew that the money, provided for a business investment in July, 1997, had come from Iraq or that the man, Korean-born Tongsun Park, was attempting to buy his influence. Mr. Park has since been indicted by U.S. authorities for allegedly working as an illegal Iraqi agent.
The inquiry said the relationship between the two men raised troubling questions regarding conflict of interest among UN officials.
According to the report, in July of 1997 in Baghdad, Mr. Park met with then-Iraqi deputy prime minister Tariq Aziz, who gave him $1-million cash in a cardboard box to be used in the embattled regime’s campaign to win favourable treatment from the UN.
A few days later, Mr. Park deposited the money in the Housing Bank-Jordan in Amman. He then wrote a cheque on the same account to “Mr. M. Strong” in the amount of $988,885, which was used to buy shares in a financially troubled, family-controlled oil company—shares that Mr. Strong himself had an obligation to buy.
[…] In addition to its account of Mr. Strong’s dealings, the report also placed an uncomfortable spotlight on two other Canadians who have played important roles at the UN.
The panel slammed deputy secretary-general Louise Frechette, who had nominal oversight over the oil-for-food program but failed to respond adequately to allegations of corruption.
Ms. [Louise] Frechette, a former senior bureaucrat in Ottawa, “did not carry out the responsibilities of her office,” Mr. Volcker said. He offered the same criticism of her boss, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan.
[…] At the same time, former Canadian spymaster Reid Morden, who is executive director of the Volcker inquiry, was forced to recuse himself from the investigation into Mr. Strong’s relationship with Mr. Park because of his previous relationship with both men.
According to the inquiry, when Mr. Morden was president of Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd. in 1996, he asked Mr. Strong and Mr. Park to help the Crown corporation sell nuclear reactors to Korea. In fact, AECL entered into a consulting arrangement with Mr. Park at the time, according to the inquiry.
Ms. Frechette, was Deputy Secretary-General of the United Nations. A lifelong state-employee, she is also a director of the Trudeau Foundation (fancy that!), and she was Deputy Defence Minister at the time of the Liberal Party Somalia Inquiry coverup (that’s fancy too!). Oh and of course she’s an Officer of the Order of Canada. Like I had to tell ya! What a fabulous career she’s had under the Liberal Party.
Vote liberal!
PTBC was founded by Mr. Johannesen in 2000.
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