There will be more criminal charges in connection with the federal sponsorship scandal.
Former advertising executive Gilles-Andre Gosselin faces 19 fraud-related counts. He'll appear in court early next year.
A public inquiry found that he billed Canadian taxpayers for more than 3,600 hours of work in 1997 alone.
In some cases, Gosselin's company received hundreds of thousands of dollars for doing no work.
Skeptical
Justice John Gomery, who presided over the sponsorship inquiry in 2004 and 2005, expressed doubt that Gosselin could have worked 12-hours days for an entire year, but Gosselin stood firm, insisting he worked every hour billed and burned himself out doing it.
Gosselin also provided one of the more dramatic moments of the inquiry when he broke down on the stand in Montreal and requested a break in proceedings.
Corruption
The sponsorship program was a national-unity fund set up under the Chretien Liberals in response to the No side's narrow win in the 1995 referendum.
The $355-million fund was created ostensibly to promote the federal brand, mainly in Quebec.
But the program was riddled with corruption as advertising executives and other middlemen bilked the fund of millions of dollars, usually for doing little or no work.
Ad man Jean Brault also blew the lid off of a scheme to funnel more than $1 million of taxpayer funds into the coffers of the cash-strapped Quebec wing of the Liberal Party of Canada.
The bureaucrat who ran the program in the 1990s, Charles Guite, has served jail time for fraud in relation to the scandal, as have several ad men including Brault.
