MONTREAL - The RCMP has charged a former federal Liberal official with fraud in connection to the sponsorship scandal that helped to bring down Paul Martin's Liberal government.
The Mounties, in a news conference Friday morning, announced charges against Benoit Corbeil, who ran the Liberal party's Quebec wing from 1999 to 2001.
Corbeil was arrested Friday and charged with influence peddling, fraud and conspiracy against the party and the federal government between 1997 and 2000.
He is accused of conspiring to defraud the party of $100,000 during his tenure by authorizing payment of false invoices. He will also be charged with breach of trust in an unrelated federal land deal.
Corbeil is one of a handful of top Quebec Liberals who ad executive Jean Brault says browbeat him for cash that was then funnelled to the party in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
Several ad executives, as well as the top bureaucrat who ran the sponsorship program, have pleaded guilty in recent years to fraud charges in connection with the program.
Corbeil gave some of the most devastating testimony at the Gomery inquiry into the sponsorship program.
In 2005, Corbeil named nine Liberal party workers as having been paid from a $50,000 cash donation by Brault.
Corbeil always denied that he pressured Brault to kick cash back to the party, and he also dismissed suggestions that he pocketed cash slated for party workers.
But he is one of several witnesses who backed Brault's account of how sponsorship money was secretly funnelled to the Liberal party in exchange for sponsorship contracts.
Brault told the inquiry that he worked with Liberal party officials to divert $1.1 million in cash in exchange for sponsorship contracts.
Scott Reid, a former senior advisor to Martin, noted on Mike Duffy Live that Corbeil is charged with "money he took from the Liberal Party."
"Frankly, he's no friend of ours," he added.
The sponsorship program was created under the former Liberal administration of longtime prime minister Jean Chretien, ostensibly to increase Ottawa's profile in Quebec following the No side's narrow victory in the 1995 referendum.
But corruption plagued the program, as Liberal-friendly ad firms pocketed massive amounts of taxpayer money while performing little or no work.
Corbeil is scheduled to appear in court Friday afternoon.
In a statement released Friday, the Liberal Party of Canada said: "People suspected of wrongdoing should be investigated, and their case dealt with in a court of law. With the sponsorship program, people did break the rules and misappropriated funds. They were discovered, and thanks to actions taken by the Liberal government of the day, they were punished."
