OTTAWA: Federal police are accusing Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper's former right-hand man of bribery, fraud and breach of trust, court documents showed Wednesday.
According to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), Nigel Wright illegally helped Conservative Senator Mike Duffy about Can$90,000 ($86,150) in fraudulent expense claims.
Those and other Conservative senators' expenses are at the center of a political scandal that has been a drag on the government's popularity.
It saw Wright leave the prime minister's office in May, and Duffy be effectively expelled from the Senate earlier this month.
Harper's former chief of staff was forced to resign after revealing that he wrote Duffy the Can$90,000 check to help the lawmaker repay housing and travel expense claims that he had wrongly claimed as Senate expenses.
The court documents also reveal for the first time that the prime minister's staff influenced lawmakers to make a Senate audit report less critical of Duffy.
Duffy has alleged that the prime minister's office came up with the scheme to try to quell a public uproar over the Senate spending and thus "make a political situation embarrassing to (Harper's) base go away."
The police documents include partial transcripts of emails within the prime minister's office that show Harper may have known more about the plot than he let on.
"The PM knows, in broad terms only, that I personally assisted Duffy when I was getting him to agree to repay the expenses," Wright said in an email just prior to his resignation.
Wright also refers in a February email to Harper's "approval" for negotiations to repay Duffy's expenses.
"I now have the go-ahead (on the repayment) with a couple of stipulations," he wrote in an email to others in the prime minister's office, including legal counsel.
He then added: "I do want to speak to the PM before everything is considered final."
In a separate email, he later wrote that he was "good to go from the PM once (legal counsel) Ben (Perrin) has his confirmation from (Duffy's lawyer Janice) Payne."
The documents state that there is no direct evidence Harper knew about the payment or that he was involved. Harper himself has denied any knowledge of the allegedly illicit scheme.
But opposition leader Tom Mulcair said: "The question is, is it plausible that the prime minister didn't know?"
"I find that less and less plausible," he added.
In the 80-page affidavit, the RCMP concluded that Duffy himself instigated what he recently described as a "monstrous fraud" on Canadians.
"The evidence I have seen shows that the demands made by Senator Duffy in February (2013) were the start of the 'monstrous fraud,'" RCMP Corporal Greg Horton wrote.
He said Wright told police he was "incensed that Senator Duffy was getting paid for meals that he ate in his own house in Ottawa."
"My intention was always to secure repayment of funds owed to taxpayers. I acted within the scope of my duties and remain confident that my actions were lawful," Wright said in a statement.
In Parliament, Harper maintained that Wright and Duffy were solely to blame.
"From the very start, it has been my position that Mr Duffy was obliged to reimburse his own expenses," he said.
"When I learned that the opposite had happened, I acted appropriately."
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