Chuck Guité, the former civil servant in charge of Ottawa's now-discredited sponsorship program, said he, too, was a victim in the scandal and was unaware ad agencies were defrauding the government.
He made the claim as he and the Crown wrapped up closing arguments Monday in his fraud trial.
Guité is accused of defrauding taxpayers of more than $1.6 million by approving a series of public work contracts for Groupaction Marketing Inc. that delivered little or no results.
Crown attorney Jacques Dagenais began his summation by apologizing to jurors for how complex the case turned out to be.
He told them that while not every piece of the puzzle will fit into place, a clear picture still emerges.
Dagenais went through the contracts Guité granted to Groupaction, pointing out areas where rules were broken in order to send money to the company.
"If you look at these contracts, everything is wrong about them, everything is totally crooked, everything is dishonest," Dagenais said.
Dagenais said the jury should ask themselves whether the government of Canada lost money because of the deliberate actions of Guité.
Dagenais said there are two ways for jurors to approach the Crown's case:
Did Guité set out to authorize contracts for the Montreal ad agency Groupaction Marketing in a bid to enrich the company? Or did Guité simply just approve payment for invoices submitted by Groupaction for work of little or no value?
Dagenais said while it's clear there was political interference in the awarding of sponsorship contracts, there's no evidence politicians ordered Guité to break the law.
He said even if they had, Guité had an obligation to refuse to go along.
But Guité, who represented himself during the trial, shot back, describing the Crown's case as incoherent and saying it took detours that had nothing to do with him.
Guité said he's not guilty of fraud even if government policies and rules were broken. He claimed he was duped, too.
The sponsorship program was created after the 1995 referendum to raise the visibility of the federal government in Quebec. Guité said the government was in panic mode following the close results of the referendum and that there was a race to hand out money to get the program underway.
He said this may have led to some rules being broken by his overworked section in Public Works.
"All contracts were awarded and invoices were issued in good faith," said Guité.
"If ad agencies defrauded the government, we were not aware of it at the time. It came to light five years later," he said. "I will not apologize for the way the program was administered from 1995 to 1999. It was done with little resources to the best of our abilities under the circumstances of the day."