MONTREAL, Que. -- A report on illegal campaign financing has focused on the past activities of the Parti Quebecois in the latest ethics allegation to surface during the provincial election.
Radio-Canada says a former fundraiser for the PQ claimed to have received $10,000 in cash from the mayor of Laval, Gilles Vaillancourt, during the 1994 provincial election.
Its report says that Claude Vallee described the incident last summer in a written statement he gave to Quebec provincial police.
Political corruption has been a hot-button issue in the campaign for the Sept. 4 election, with all parties pointing fingers at each other.
The French-language CBC, Radio-Canada, has in particular produced reports with incendiary suggestions about activities by people linked to all three major parties.
The first was a report about Premier Jean Charest's chat at a public event with a union official, one with alleged Mafia ties, who was under police investigation.
Then there was a story that a Coalition star candidate, Jacques Duchesneau, vastly under-reported the amount of cash his former mayoral campaign had raised.
Now the PQ's past fundraising practices have been called into question.
According to the network, Vallee gave the money to Michel Goyer, an organizer for then-PQ candidate David Cliche in the riding of Vimont.
In an interview with Radio-Canada, Vallee did not confirm or deny he collected the money. But Goyer and Cliche did deny they were ever offered such cash -- as did the mayor.
It's not the first time Vaillancourt has been forced to deny such activities. He also denied offering money during a provincial election to Liberal Vincent Auclair and former PQ cabinet minister Serge Menard.
18:45ET 22-08-12
