Mr. Speaker, on September 23 I asked the government to inquire into the current discrepancies between records filed by the member for LaSalle—Émard as the then minister of finance, and documents published by his lawyer and posted on the website of the ethics counsellor.
The minister's statement was filed in February 2002. It said that through a company called Sheilamart Enterprises he owned 438,210 preferred shares of Passage Holdings Incorporated which owned Canada Steamship Lines and other entities. His lawyer's filing made no reference to his holdings in Sheilamart.
There is a public interest in knowing what happened to those Sheilamart shares. Were they cashed out in some unrecorded transaction either in Canada or abroad? Were they transferred to someone else and if so, who?
According to his lawyer the total financial interest of the former finance minister in Canada Steamship Lines was less than a million dollars.
That is a lot of money to you and me, Mr. Speaker, but not to the member for LaSalle—Émard. This is a multimillion dollar company. It is wholly owned by the former minister and his immediate family. Its value has been increasing. Its costs have been cut by firing Canadian workers and by flying under foreign flags. It benefits from a major tax haven in Barbados which was protected while the former minister was the minister responsible for Canadian tax policy.
It is frankly hard to believe that his personal financial interest in this international money machine was so small. Yet his lawyer's letter says, “The Passage Shares have an aggregate redemption value of $829,000”.
That claim is more curious because the public record shows that the redemption value of each preferred share in Passage Holdings Inc. is $100 per share plus dividends. The former minister owned 438,210 preferred shares. At $100 per share, that works out to a redemption value of at least $43,821,000. That is $43 million more than the value stated by his lawyer.
The former minister may claim the shares he owned in Sheilamart were a class of shares which had a lower redemption value. The share structure of Sheilamart was changed in December 2000, just after the election, to create new class E shares which carried a lower voting power.
However, by definition, those low voting shares did not exist before December 2000. Yet the former minister controlled the company for years before that. What was the redemption value of the preferred shares he held then?
If he surrendered them, when a new share class was established in December 2000, did he just give away the money? Was there some unrecorded transfer that his lawyer chose not to make part of the public record?
While the new class E shares may have a lower voting weight than the shares he had before, how can anyone be sure of their redemption value? The agreement which created the new shares said that redemption value would be affected specifically by the value of the consideration received by Passage Holdings Incorporated. That value could be challenged by Revenue Canada. That could increase the amount significantly. Those facts were not mentioned in the letter from the former minister's lawyer.
The government would not answer my questions. It told me to ask the ethics counsellor myself. I have done that in a detailed letter dated September 26.
These matters are of great importance because the former minister has just been handed a free pass to become Prime Minister of the country. Prior to that he was given an arrangement called a managed blind trust that had never been available to a Canadian cabinet minister in the history of this country. At the time that he was finance minister he was briefed regularly on the business affairs of his multinational company.
Mystery surrounds the man who would be Prime Minister. The people of Canada have a right to know some of the details about transactions which are known to the ethics counsellor.