Billionaire friends who funded Brian Mulroney’s St. F.X. legacy project got honorary degrees
Two Canadian businessmen identified in connection with corruption scandals contributed a combined $5.5 million to former PM’s $60-million institute
Last year, former prime minister Brian Mulroney returned to his alma mater, St. Francis Xavier University in Nova Scotia, to announce the creation of the $60-million Brian Mulroney Institute of Government.
Standing on stage wearing a dark suit and a broad smile, Mulroney, 78, said launching his institute at St. F.X. — “where my heart is” — represented a “high honour.”
Documents obtained by the Toronto Star and CBC/RadioCanada reveal that to fund his institute — intended to teach public policy to undergraduate students — Mulroney enlisted dozens of wealthy power players, some with controversial backgrounds, including two billionaires who have been publicly identified in connection with international corruption scandals.
Canadian-British billionaire Victor Dahdaleh — the middleman in a massive international bribery scheme — and Wafic Said — a Syrian-Saudi billionaire and ex-arms broker — contributed a combined $5.5 million to Mulroney’s legacy project.
Within months of making their donations, both men received honorary degrees from the university.
Both are also Middle Eastern-born Canadian citizens whose professional careers — and the billions they earned — unfolded outside of Canada. Dahdaleh was born in Jordan and attended McGill University before moving to Europe. Said’s ties to Canada include a numbered company and a down-market Montreal address during late 1980s and early ’90s.
Both men have operated corporations in no-tax offshore jurisdictions. And both have a history of large, high-profile donations to universities, which have placed their names on buildings and parchments of honorary degrees.
Announcing the institute last year, university president Kent MacDonald called it “the most transformative project in the history of this university in 164 years,” and called Mulroney “one of our greatest sons.”
No reference was made to Mulroney’s role in what came to be known as the Airbus affair. Justice Jeffrey Oliphant concluded that Mulroney’s relationship with German-Canadian businessman Karlheinz Schreiber, from whom he received secret payments in cash-stuffed envelopes totalling $225,000, was “inappropriate.”
“Something was amiss,” Oliphant wrote in his 2010 commission of inquiry report. “These dealings do not reflect the highest standards of conduct, nor do they represent conduct that is so scrupulous it will bear the closest public scrutiny.”
Oliphant dismissed Mulroney’s explanation that he had made an “error in judgment” by accepting three separate payments from Schreiber: “I am driven to conclude that it is virtually impossible that Mr. Mulroney committed the same significant error in judgment on three separate occasions. It seems to me that, given Mr. Mulroney’s education, background, experience and business acumen, his every instinct would have been, and should have been, to document the transaction in some manner.”
Mulroney travelled far and wide to solicit donations for the institute, MacDonald said.
“There are very few people in this country that can pick up the phone with a Rolodex like Brian Mulroney.”
Some of Canada’s biggest companies appear on the institute’s donor list, including BMO, CIBC, Scotiabank, TD Financial and Magna.
Individual donors include businessmen Ron Joyce, Charles Bronfman, Galen Weston, Gerald Schwartz and Paul Desmarais, former RBC executive Anthony Fell and Prem Watsa, head of investment firm Fairfax Financial Holdings.
The list also includes some controversial North American billionaires, including oil baron David Koch, famous for influencing American public policy by financing the right-wing Tea Party and advocating lower personal and corporate tax rates; Barrick Gold Corp. founder Peter Munk, whose mining companies have been accused of alleged environmental and human rights violations; and U.S. Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross.
Paradise Papers reports published earlier this month revealed Ross’s ties to a shipping company that has received more than $68 million (U.S.) in payments since 2011 from a Russian energy company co-owned by the son-in-law of Russian President Vladimir Putin.
After the reports, Ross said he would fully divest his interests in the company.
“There’s a point at which it passes a certain threshold of moral repugnance,” says Peter McInnis, chair of St. F.X.’s history department and a member of the university’s senate. “Names like the Koch brothers are beyond the pale. They’ve done enormous damage to our democratic system.
“When names like Koch or Wilbur Ross are mentioned, that’s not something I would defend at all,” says McInnis, who was unaware of the complete list of funders until told by the Star. “This is deeply troubling . . . It really is at odds with the purported mission of this university so we have a disconnect and we have some questions to ask.”
Dahdaleh, 74, and Said, 77, stand out on the list of funders because of the honours bestowed upon them by the rural university in Antigonish, N.S., with which they have no apparent ties except Mulroney himself.
Said donated $4 million, including $3 million to fund the Mila Mulroney Chair in Women’s Leadership for Global Change, according to a March 2015 agreement obtained through freedom of information requests.
Two months later, Said stood on the stage at St. F.X. to receive an honorary doctor of laws for his “philanthropic endeavours around the world.”
Mulroney was also on the stage and Said acknowledged him as “one of the greatest and most successful prime ministers of our time . . . I am very honoured to receive this in his presence.”
It wasn’t the first time Said had made a high-profile academic donation: the University of Oxford’s business school bears his name ever since he made a £20-million contribution 21 years ago.
On Dec. 5, 2015, mere months after Said got his honorary degree from St. F.X., Dahdaleh received his doctor of laws degree.
“St. F.X. is one of the most prestigious academic institutions in Canada and I am delighted to be joining you today . . . as a fellow alumnus,” Dahdaleh told the crowd.
Four months later, he signed an agreement to donate $1.5 million to fund the Victor Dahdaleh Chair in Democracy and Governance post at the Mulroney institute.
Dahdaleh has also received an honorary degree from York University, where a global health institute has been created in his name following a $20-million donation in 2015; he donated $3.5 million to McGill last year to support the Victor DahdalehClinton Foundation Scholarship program and has sat on the McGill University Trust; and he is an honorary fellow at the London School of Economics.
Elsa Jensen, a former associate professor at the St. F.X. nursing school, sat on the honorary degree committee when it considered Dahdaleh’s nomination.
The committee was given no material about criminal charges Dahdaleh faced in Britain related to an international bribery scandal.
“We did not as a committee do our due diligence, and therefore did not fulfil our role as a committee, to support nominations that reflect dignity, integrity and outstanding service to the community,” she said.
“If we had actually done the research that we should have done, I can’t see how we would have chosen him. I don’t believe we would have. I feel really bad about it. It’s wrong.”
St. F.X. president MacDonald did not agree to an interview for this story.
In a written statement he said: “As an educator, I believe there is no more powerful way to improve society than to educate its citizens. On this point alone, the St. F.X. community has benefitted because of the philanthropy of Mr. Said and Mr. Dahdaleh, and the campaign leadership provided by Mr. Mulroney. We are honoured by their commitment to enrich the lives of young people around the world.”
Both Dahdaleh and Said declined interview requests for this story.
A written statement from Said says he has known Brian and Mila Mulroney for many years and calls Mulroney “a great prime minister and world statesman . . . I have the highest regard for his many achievements.”
Mulroney also declined interview requests. In a written statement, he called Said “an outstanding man, a highly successful investor and a leading philanthropist. He is also a good friend.” Honorary degree granting to wealthy benefactors seeking reputational redemption or public prestige has become “endemic” in the Canadian university world, says Jim Turk, former executive director of the Canadian Association of University Teachers and now director of the Centre for Free Expression at Ryerson University.
“As universities become more and more desperate for money, the standards of whose money they take decrease,” he says. “The question I would put to them is, what would a person have to do to make their money unattractive to you? I’m not sure they’ve ever seen a dollar they didn’t like.”
The Paradise Papers leak, obtained by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists which includes the Star and CBC/Radio-Canada, reveals that Mulroney sat on the board of Bermuda-based Said Holdings Limited between 2004 and 2012. During this time, the British Serious Fraud Office, as part of the biggest corruption case in British history, was investigating the Al-Yamamah deal to sell £43 billion in British warplanes to Saudi Arabia beginning in 1985.
Said, who has been open about his role in brokering the deal, was never charged in the case and says he offered to meet with investigators to assist but was never invited.
“I am proud of the role I played in helping to secure the Al-Yamamah programme and with it many tens of thousands of well-paid and highly skilled jobs in the United Kingdom,” Said wrote in a statement.
In 2003, the Guardian newspaper revealed the existence of a £20-million slush fund used to bribe Saudi officials. Three years later, British investigators had zeroed in on several Swiss bank accounts and were negotiating access to bank records when then-prime minister Tony Blair terminated the investigation.
It was later reported that the Saudi government had given the British government two weeks to shut down the investigation or Saudi Arabia would stop sharing terrorism intelligence.
In 2010, BAE, the British arms manufacturer, pleaded guilty to conspiracy charges in the U.S. in 2010 and paid a $400-million (U.S.) fine.
Said was close with both then-U.K. prime minister Margaret Thatcher and members of the Saudi royal family, especially former Saudi ambassador to the U.S., Prince Bandar bin Sultan, who is also the son of the former Saudi defence minister.
“He used his unique relationships with the Saudi royal family to act as an intermediary on deals with billions of dollars,” said Andrew Feinstein, the executive director of the group Corruption Watch in the U.K. “A major arms deal doesn’t happen without corruption . . . You need somebody to distance those bribes from the government or the company and the recipients of the bribes and that is the intermediary, the arms dealers.”
Mulroney appears in the minutes of board meetings in Bermuda, Monaco, Paris and New York between 2004 and 2008, often offering his take on how American politics might affect the economy.
“Mr. Mulroney . . . agreed that a Bush election victory would restore some stability to the markets. He added that he anticipated a decisive Bush victory,” according to minutes of a meeting held in New York on Sept. 29, 2004.
During a meeting in Monaco two years later, Mulroney asked if the company’s audit committee “kept an eye on transactions which could bring (Said Holdings Ltd.) into the purview of the U.S. tax authorities,” meeting minutes read.
Dahdaleh has faced his own allegations of playing middleman in a bribery scheme.
In 2014, U.S. aluminum giant Alcoa settled with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) paying one of the largest anti-corruption fines ever — $384 million (U.S.) The company admitted that it participated in a “corruption scheme” which “facilitated at least $110 million in corrupt payments to Bahraini officials” through “Consultant A.”
That consultant was paid a commission on sales in which “no legitimate services were provided to justify the role of the consultant.”
The consultant’s offshore shell company — called Alumet — “had no legitimate business operations,” the U.S. Department of Justice claimed in court filings, and the “corrupt arrangement” allowed “Consultant A” to “enrich himself and pay bribes to senior government officials of Bahrain.”
Dahdaleh faced charges of corruption and money laundering in a British criminal trial for his role. But he was acquitted in 2013 when the case against him collapsed because two key prosecution witnesses failed to show up to testify and another changed his evidence.
His identity as Consultant A was never made public — until last year’s Panama Papers leak.
A Toronto Star/CBC investigation based on those records revealed for the first time Dahdaleh’s identity as the sole director of Alumet.
Dahdaleh did not challenge the reports.
The process of choosing candidates for honorary degrees in Canadian universities is shrouded in secrecy.
St. F.X. guidelines say that a committee on honorary degrees receives nominations from members of the university community for people who have attained prominence in their fields. Candidates approved by the committee are presented to the senate. If the candidate is approved by senate, the name goes to the president, who decides whether to grant the honorary degree.
It is not known who nominated Victor Dahdaleh or Wafic Said.
Documents obtained by the Star and CBC reveal some details about the university’s courtship of Dahdaleh.
It began with lunch on Oct. 17, 2015, when president MacDonald travelled to London to tell Dahdaleh of the decision to award him a doctor of laws. In an email written to MacDonald after the lunch, Dahdaleh wrote: “I must admit I was very surprised with the fantastic news about St. F.X. awarding me the degree of doctor of laws. I’m very proud and honoured to accept and to become part of the community at your university.”
A response from MacDonald, addressed to “Victor and Mona,” reads: “Thank you for taking the time to share a beautiful lunch with MaryEllen and me. We find you both incredibly gracious and we thoroughly enjoyed our time together today.”
MacDonald told Dahdaleh the senate was “wise in their decision to confer on you the degree . . . It represents the years and years of impact you have had on society and St. F.X. will be proud of bring you into the Xaverian family.”
On Dec. 5, 2015, at a lunch in Antigonish, about 40 people “celebrated this achievement prior to the convocation ceremony.”
Peter McInnis, chair of St. F.X.’s history department, was not a member of senate when Dahdaleh and Said were presented as prospective honorary degree recipients.
If he were, he would have rejected the nominations, he says.
“The awarding of degrees also confers some condoning or acceptance of the person themselves,” he said. “It is the responsibly of the people on those committees to participate more fully in their deliberations. I think a lot of our colleagues . . . are busy with our other professional responsibilities and should probably focus more carefully on this . . . We were amiss collectively.”
Speaking out or rejecting honorary degree candidates that could bring money that the school administration wants can be tricky, he says.
“It is discussed in the halls and corridors rather than out in the open,” he says. “Senators aren’t to be intimidated from expressing their views but often people are hesitant.”
In a written statement, MacDonald said the process of honorary degree granting at the university is “very rigorous and well defined.”
“St. F.X. is proud of the contributions of all individuals who have received an honorary degree from our university,” MacDonald’s statement reads.
Mulroney Hall, the permanent home of the institute, which accepted its first cohort of students this past September, is scheduled to open June of 2019.
“There are very few people in this country that can pick up the phone with a Rolodex like Brian Mulroney.” KENT MACDONALD ST. FRANCIS XAVIER UNIVERSITY PRESIDENT ON THE FORMER PRIME MINISTER’S FUNDRAISING EFFORTS