THE CANADIAN PRESS

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OTTAWA - Alfonso Gagliano has lost a legal bid to overturn the findings of John Gomery's sponsorship inquiry.

In a ruling Friday, Justice Max Teitelbaum of the Federal Court rejected the former public works minister's claims of bias and procedural unfairness.

The judge said there is sufficient evidence to support commissioner Gomery's conclusion that Gagliano was partly to blame for the federal sponsorship scandal.

This came just months after Teitelbaum found that Gomery had been unfair in his findings against former prime minister Jean Chretien and his chief aide Jean Pelletier.

In the Gagliano case, Teitelbaum said that while his job was not to reweigh the evidence, he had to determine whether there was enough on the record to meet the required legal threshold.

"In the light of that review, I am persuaded that the standard was met and that my intervention is not warranted in this case," he wrote in the judgment.

"The evidence supporting the findings made with respect to (Gagliano) is abundant, and I am of the opinion that the commissioner did not commit any error in assigning responsibility."

The Liberal government of the day set up the sponsorship program to boost the federal profile in Quebec following the near-win by sovereigntists in the 1995 referendum. Ottawa spent about $250 million from 1997 to 2003 to sponsor almost 2,000 cultural, community and sporting events.

In his 2005 report, Gomery found Gagliano shared some responsibility for millions of dollars skimmed by Liberal-friendly advertising agencies.

Gomery concluded Gagliano became directly involved in decisions to provide funding to events and projects based more on partisan goals than on national unity considerations.

He also found Gagliano failed to properly oversee adoption of guidelines and criteria for awarding sponsorships to advertising agencies and did not adequately monitor the officials who ran the program.

It recently emerged that Gagliano bought a vineyard in Quebec's Eastern Townships with a $550,000 loan from Farm Credit Canada, a federal Crown corporation.

In a ruling last June, Teitelbaum said Chretien and Pelletier, his chief of staff, did not get a fair hearing at the Gomery commission. He set aside a finding that the two were to be "blamed for omissions" in oversight of the sponsorship program and therefore shared responsibility for its mismanagement.