Harper's Parade of Perps with Perks #6

Bunch up everyone to make room for Steve's latest Perp with Perks, Saulie Zajdel.

Arrested today and facing five counts of corruption, breach of trust, and fraud from 2006 to 2011 in the anti-corruption sweep that also bagged the mayor of Montreal, Zajdel is better known to us as the guy who was put on the public payroll as a "cultural liaison" by Heritage Min James Moore for an alleged $60G's to act as the Cons' shadow pretend MP in Irving Cotler's riding after he lost to him in the 2011 election.  

Here's Steve campaigning for Zajdel three days before Election Day.

Here's Nick Kouvalis from Campaign Research defending their        "reprehensible" calls made into the riding on Steve and Zajdel's behalf implying Cotler would not run.

After his election loss to Cotler, Zajdel gave speeches in the Mount Royal riding, such as one advertised as : “How the Federal Government Relates to Israel.” 

A 2011 election campaign vid uploaded by Zajdel, along with the tagline :

"Let us thank our prime minister Stephen Harper for how he supports the land of Israel, he is its strongest advocate of any leader in the world."

Steve and Saulie in happier times in a photo op featuring brown paper bags - a prop usually avoided by the Cons after Brian Mulroney.
Mulroney spoke at a $600-a-plate fundraiser for Dean Del Mastro, another Perp with Perks, this past May. [h/t Toe at Bread 'n Roses]

Brown bag photo h/t : Robert Jensen2 via Holly Stick in comments.
And to Canadian Cynic for the nudge.

Previous Perps editions with bios.
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Harper's Parade of Perps with Perks - Part 5

Updated : h/t Canadian Cynic

Welcome Con MPs Devinder Shory, James Bezan, Shelly Glover, and update! House Speaker Andrew Scheer to the growing family scandal of Steve's Parade of Perps with Perks.  

Devinder Shory, Calgary Northeast, accused of providing legal work that supported allegedly fraudulent mortgages - in his case at least five straw-buyer cases of more than $3.7 million:

Promised a payment of up to $8,000, hundreds of straw buyers, mostly new immigrants, allowed their names to be used to obtain falsely inflated mortgages on over 200 properties. When the straw buyers could not pay up, the bank would foreclose and the "masterminds" would walk away, wiring proceeds from the alleged fraud to Lebanon, India, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Dubai. 

[T]he Alberta Lawyers Insurance Association (ALIA) has agreed to pay $9.2 million to BMO to settle the case on behalf of all 17 lawyers named in the suit."

April 28 2014 Update : Two Con candidates hoping to challenge Devinder Shory appear to have had their nomination papers quashed by Dimitri Soudas to protect Shory.

Two years after the election, Elections Canada is still waiting for campaign expenses compliance from Manitoba Con MPs James Bezan and law 'n order gal Shelly Glover regarding documents that put them over the top of their allowed amounts ... just like Perp with Perks veteran Peter Penashue in Labrador. Both Glover and Bezan have filed court applications to prevent their being barred from the House by EC's Marc Mayrand while Con Party lawyer Arthur Hamilton wrangles their cases.

ETA : Dear Mr. Hamilton : Clawing back campaign staffers' pay a year later in order to get Glover under the spending limit wire in what you refer to as "an honest mistake of fact" seems a bit mean. I also fail to see how having election campaign signs up in places where the traffic is poor disqualifies their existence as, you know, election campaign signs.

Belated addition of House Speaker Andrew Scheer, MP, for sitting on Mayrand's formal letter of May 24 advising him Bezan and Glover were in violation of election law and therefore ineligible to sit in the House. Scheer did not advise the House and the next day Glover filed a court challenge, followed by Bezan. 
We the public of course would not have known about any of this if the media had not dug into it - hats off to Kady and McMaher.

Very good post from Dr.Dawg on whether rule of law still exists if a sitting government can flout it without repercussion. Whether the court finds any mitigating factors in Bezan and Glover's applications or not and regardless of Scheer's eventual ruling, the Cons will claim it a victory and continue on as they like. 

Running out of perp parade room here and the month is yet young ... I'm going to have to start setting out benches at the back for the next batch to stand on.

Previous editions/perps' bios
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Harper's Parade of Perps with Perks - Part 4

Please welcome Senators David Tkachuk, Marjory LeBreton and Carolyn Stewart Olsen to the growing family scandal of Steve's Parade of Perps with Perks.  Click to enjoy.

While Steve is still going with the lone topgun chief of staff on the Duffy knoll with the chequebook story from his temporary hideout in South America, his perps at home are busy fucking that up for him. 

We were most relieved to hear from Senator Tkachuk that even though he was soliciting advice from the Prime Minister's Office on how to do his audit of Duffy, and Nigel Wright was calling him up wanting to know "When is this thing over with?", Senator Tkachuk assures us that "no one came to my room and told me what to do."

Well that's good to know but with Steve's former-press-secretary-now-Senator Carolyn Stewart Olsen spearheading the Duffy audit whitewash/rewrite in the steering committee for you, your own room was pretty well always safe, wasn't it? 

That whitewashed audit is now winging its way back to the same perps for further review and Steve's buddy, government leader in the senate Marjory LeBreton, has refused to open the hearings, complaining she lives in a town "populated by Liberal elitists and their lickspittle media” and is not getting enough credit for opening up the senate to Steve's scandal.

Excellent piece on this from Mound of Sound

Updated Perps with Perks and their bios.
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Harper's Parade of Perps with Perks - Part 3

Please welcome Nigel Wright, Steve's chief of staff on loan from Onex Corp and the latest member of Harper's Parade of Perps with Perks, for secretly cutting Mike Duffy a $90,000 personal cheque to paper over the senate investigation and Deloitte audit into Mike Duffy's creative housing expense claims and reports he billed the Senate for travel while campaigning for the Cons .

Duffy isn't co-operating with the investigations now he has the cash but that didn't stop House leader Peter Van Loan from praising him for his "leadership" in returning money that didn't belong to him. 
Duffy : 

"It's become a major distraction so my wife and I discussed it and we decided that in order to turn the page and put all this behind us, we are going to voluntarily pay back the living expenses related to the house we have in Ottawa"

Ah yes the Royal Bank loan and the PMO instruction to keep his little head down.
Unfortunately Duffy then blabbed around town about his secret cheque from Wright.

So which is it then? A bank loan or a personal cheque from Steve's chief of staff? 
Both? Given he purportedly has secured the bank loan to cover the senate repayment, what's the cash bonanza from Nigel Wright for exactly?

“The PM was not aware of the specifics,” Andrew MacDougall, Mr. Harper’s director of communications, has said of this transaction when asked.

I think that's called implausible deniability.

Nigel Wright, a founding director of the Manning Centre for Building Democracy, has resigned.
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Updated Perps with perks and their bios.

Arrgh update. Typo correction : That should have been "a founding director"; without that "a", it made him sound like the only one.  Apologies.
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Penashue's Extortion Action Plan

                               Peter Penashue's Extortion Action! Plan! concept via Canadian Cynic

Former Minister of Intergovernmental Affairs Peter Penashue ran for office in 2011 under the campaign slogan "Peter for All". Winning that election by just 79 votes, he resigned his Labrador seat last month over an ongoing Elections Canada investigation that found his campaign overspent and accepted illegal donations. 

So it was a bit of a surprise when he was back on the campaign trail last week bragging to his constituents that he held up a Newfoundland project for six months in order to get $85-million in funding for a highway for Labrador. 
Intergovernmental Affairs Minister for All indeed. 

He also claimed that when re-elected and re-installed as a Con cabinet minister, he would be instrumental in boosting pork to the Canadian Forces Base in his riding.

Tony Gazebo won his Parry Sound-Muskoka riding in 2006 by a mere 28 votes.
In 2008, following election endorsements from local mayors on his G8 slush fund tailgate committee which he used to misdirect $50-million in public funds intended for border infrastructure to gazebos and flower pots in his riding, he increased that vote margin to almost 11,000.  A pretty good deal at $2,290 per vote. 
Now he's President of the Treasury Board.

So however laughable it may seem to us at the moment, there's still a glimmer of hope for Penashue and his Economic Extortion Action Plan buy-election.

Creekside will resume its all-outsourcing-all-the-time coverage shortly.
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Penashue's political dodgeball

I thought Con MP Pierre Poilievre held the dodgeball record for giving the same identical non-answer seven times to seven different questions put to him by a single reporter in November 2012, but three months earlier now-former Labrador Con MP and cabinet minister Peter Penashue had already swallowed the ballgag whole at eight identical non-answers to eight different questions from a reporter about his election spending violations. Eight "working closely with Elections Canada"s in just over 2 minutes.

If this government were any more transparent, they'd be completely invisible but for the scandals.

h/t Diamondwalker at Pogge's for Penashue vid.

Monday Update : Kady reports Penashue has already hit the campaign trail for his election do-over even though the byelection hasn't been called yet. Well that's handy - until it is officially called, Penashue's pre-writ electioneering won't count as a campaign expense. Also noted by Kady, Penashue's re-election website went up 4 days before he resigned.

This could be the start of a whole new election strategy for the Cons - spend whatever you like in an election, accept corporate donations and change the paperwork later, whatever. Then when you get caught, resign and begin again outside the spending limits time period, secure in the knowledge the Con Party will repay your illegal debts.
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Harper's Parade of Perps with Perks

Time to update Harper's Parade of Perps again, says Canadian Cynic.
Ok then ... let's add three more to make it an even ten Parade of Perps with Perks.

New entrant below the still unidentified Mr RoboCon is Saskatchewan Senator Pamela Wallin, seen here in 2000 advertizing her stint as host of  Who Wants to Buy a Millionaire? in New York where she owns an apartment. Senator Wallin is not currently being investigated for clocking $321,027 in "other" senate travel expenses because she does visit her Saskatchewan residence even she holds an Ontario residency health card just like PEI Senator Mike Duffy. However the former investigative journalist does not want to discuss it, explaining it's a "point of privacy". 

Between Duffy and Bruce Carson stands Labrador MP and Intergovernmental Affairs Minister Peter Penashue, who resigned from both yesterday following reports of illegal overspending and accepting corporate contributions disguised as individual donations in his 79-vote win over the Liberal incumbent in the last election. The Conservative Party transferred $44,350 to his campaign last November and this month to cover his overspending repayment debts.
Penashue explained that "mistakes were made by an inexperienced volunteer" - Reg Bowers, the campaign's official agent - who was subsequently appointed by Resources Minister Joe Oliver to the Canada-Newfoundland and Labrador Offshore Petroleum Board. The CNLOPB bio describes Bowers as "having extensive business involvement" and "a Bachelor of Commerce" as well as "post secondary work with the Canadian Institute of Chartered Accountants." Still, you know ... math.
Penashue intends to have a do-over election, presumably before Elections Canada gets around to finishing an investigation which could bar him from running for election again.
Yesterday a Conservative Party spokesman explained : Nice riding you got there, Labrador, be a shame if something happened to it :

He will be the Conservative Party candidate in the by-election and if Newfoundland and Labrador want to continue to have a strong voice within government they need to re-elect him as the Member of Parliament for Labrador.

Under Steve is Dean Del Mastro, Steve's parliamentary secretary and pointman on the robocall election scandal, being investigated over his $21,000 personal cheque to Frank Hall at Holinshed Research Group for voter ID/GOTV services. Ah, I see the Frank Hall vid I reposted a month ago is "no longer available" at Youtube. So how's the rest of the RCMP/Elections Canada investigation into Del Mastro's scandal-ridden 2008 election campaign going, huh?
Fun fact : Del Mastro has now missed 26 consecutive Ethics committee meetings.

Well that's all for now, folks. Stay tuned though - it's only March.

Update : Collect the whole set!
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