WARRANTS TO STAY SEALED UNTIL MARCH

The evidence gathered by police in a 20-month drug and organized crime
probe and in a spin-off investigation that led to raids at the B.C.
legislature is so intertwined that a judge refused Friday to separate
the two cases.

B.C. Supreme Court Justice Patrick Dohm rejected the media's request
to unseal search warrant information in the drug probe because he had
ruled a day earlier to keep documents in the legislature case closed
for at least another six weeks.

"I think it most unwise at this juncture to separate the matter and
order an unsealing of one file and not the other," Dohm said.

"The matters are so intertwined in the evidence on which they rely
that to separate them would cause harm, perhaps irreparable harm, to
both sides of this issue."

Police issued a series of search warrants Dec. 28 in both cases.
Police said at the time that evidence gathered during the drug probe
led to a separate case that resulted in raids at the legislature and
at the home offices of several people linked to the provincial and
federal Liberals.

However, police have never said how much of a cross-over in evidence
there was in the two cases.

The drug and money laundering investigation also appears to be far
more expansive than earlier thought as it was revealed in court Friday
that at least 50 search warrants have been executed in the last 20
months.

To date, the public has only been told about a small number of search
warrants in the drug case: five executed on Dec. 28 in B.C. and
several in Toronto in mid-December.

Five people were named in the Dec. 28 drug warrants, but a publication
ban imposed Friday prohibits identifying three of them. It can only be
revealed they include a businessman and his accountant. The accountant
is not considered a suspect in the case.

Dave Basi, the fired ministerial assistant of Finance Minister Gary
Collins, and an acquaintance of his named Mandeep Sandhu have been
identified previously as being named in the warrants.

The lawyers representing those named in the warrants all received
"severely" edited transcripts of the search warrant documents
Thursday. Those transcripts, between 200 and 300 pages long, had many
pages blanked out and were widely criticized as incomplete,
prejudicial and flawed.

The lawyers argued so much information had to be legally taken out of
the search warrant information -- such as details about wiretaps or
police informants -- that the summaries could fuel more public
speculation rather than answer questions about the case.

Chris Considine, Basi's lawyer, said the thick pile of documents
represented only 15 to 20 per cent of the search warrant material.

However, media lawyers --who are the appellants in this case -- were
prohibited from seeing the documents and were excluded from a private
hearing with the judge to discuss the merits of the edited documents.

Dohm started the day saying the warrants would be released that day,
but Barry Gibson, who represents The Vancouver Sun, said a "snag" must
have developed at the private meeting to make the judge change his
mind.

"It would appear that snag is an inter-relationship between this
[drug] material and the material filed in support of the [legislature]
warrants. And so at that point, the judge said it's just too
intertwined and he's going to link the two together as far as
disclosure goes, and the upshot for the media is that we're not going
to see anything until March 2 at the earliest," Gibson told reporters
outside court.

Dohm ruled all sides would return to court March 2 -- giving police
several weeks to go through the 33 boxes of documents seized from the
legislature -- to further discuss releasing summaries of both sets of
search warrants.

In court, Gibson rejected the arguments of the lawyers trying to keep
the documents sealed, saying concerns about their clients being
embarrassed because they are named in the documents does not outweigh
the basic rule of openness in the justice system.

He also said it wasn't fair to attack the media for covering a case
that has attracted intense public interest.

"[They are] trying to paint the media as the villain here. The media
isn't the villain, they are trying to do their job," Gibson said.

The Liberal party of Canada joined media lawyers Thursday arguing for
the documents to be unsealed so the public could get more information
about the case.

Media lawyer Roger McConchie argued unsuccessfully Friday that
releasing more information about the case was "a matter of
super-ordinate importance" because of the public scrutiny being felt
by the federal and provincial Liberals.

"The reality in this case is that because of the search of the
legislature building the public eye is focused not only on the
courts," he told Dohm.

Media lawyers also rejected arguments that releasing the documents
could tarnish a potential jury pool, arguing that because charges
haven't been laid in either case it would be at least two years before
a trial were held.

In the end, Dohm said he had to balance the competing interests in the
case. "There is on the one hand the openness of the court process and
on the other hand the fairness of a trial and the protection of the
innocent," he said, adding the edited search warrant documents were
too incomplete to release.

"At this stage, the risks are simply too great to unseal the
material."

While Dohm's ruling Friday was frustrating for media lawyers, it was a
victory for four lawyers trying to keep the documents sealed to
protect the interests of their clients, who have not been charged with
any offences.

Robert Janes, who represents a businessman, argued the need to protect
the innocent outweighs the public's right to openness.

"[My client] is going to be stigmatized in the press when this
material is released," Janes, a Victoria lawyer, told Dohm. "It's not
his fault that this investigation has taken such a high profile."

Lawyer Robert Mulligan, who represented an accountant raided by
police, said his client is neither a suspect nor target of the
investigation and linking him to it publicly would be "professional
capital punishment."

"He is an entirely innocent person," Mulligan said outside
court.

Mulligan, who argued that innocent people should not have their
reputations tarnished by being linked to an investigation involving
drugs and money laundering, was pleased that the search warrants --
and the name of his client -- remain sealed.

"I think most reasonable British Columbians believe in fairness and do
not want their reputations tarnished . . . by innuendo or the process
of guilt by association," he said.

Considine argued in court the release of any information from the
warrants would result in a "trial by media."

"It is not appropriate . . . to further add fuel to that speculation,"
he said.

Outside court, Considine said news reports about his client's office
at the legislature being raided have taken a toll on Basi.

"This is a man who four weeks ago was married with two young children,
enjoying his job working for the people of British Columbia . . . and
he's now been fired. He has no job. He has a swirl of media
speculation around him," Considine said.

"So, it has not been easy . . . [but] he expects to be fully
exonerated by the process at the end of the day."

Prosecutors say it will be two to four months before charges are laid
in the drug case, and at least four months before anyone will face
charges in the legislature case.