Jean Charest and his wife, Michèle Dionne, at Saint-Tite in 2008. Martin Sauvageau/Flickr/Wikimedia Commons Martin Sauvageau/Flickr/Wikimedia Commons

*This story has been updated with news that Jean Charest is not running for the Conservative leadership, and his subsequent comments.

Jean Charest will not seek the leadership of the Conservative Party of Canada.

His plan to return to federal politics ran up against an ongoing police investigation into financing practices of the Quebec Liberal Party under his watch, when Marc Bibeau was a party fundraiser.

“I know Mr. Bibeau,” Charest said. “He is an honest man.”

In an interview with Radio-Canada’s Patrice Roy, he described the six-year investigation centred on Bibeau, his friend and Liberal fundraiser, and himself, as a “fishing expedition.”

He added that UPAC, Quebec’s permanent anti-corruption police, is itself under investigation by the Bureau des enquêtes indépendantes, Quebec’s Special Investigations Unit, and that the former director of UPAC had resigned on Quebec’s Oct. 1, 2018 election day.

READ MORE: The return of Jean Charest?

Charest said, UPAC had conducted 300 interviews, going back to his first political meeting in 1984, when he first ran for Parliament at age 25, and asking people whether his wife Michelle Dionne was courteous with the staff.

“No charges after six years?” he said. “What is stopping them?

“Nothing.”

Charest said he had acted in a responsible manner and that the Quebec Liberals had returned illegal contributions when they came to light.

Charest did not mention the UPAC investigation in an earlier statement Tuesday, saying he had been solicited to run, but has a “happy family life” and an active law practice.

Charest said the rules for leadership candidates do not favour outside candidates and the deadlines are “very short.”

Candidates must raise $300,000 and nomination papers must include 3,000 signatures from across the country, with the first $25,000 and 1,000 signatures submitted by Feb. 27.

As well the party “has undergone deep changes since I left in 1998.”

“My positions regarding a number of social issues are based on deep convictions,” Charest said in a news release, adding the Conservative Party needs “a credible and ambitious plan in regard to the management of natural resources and the fight against climate change. One does not exclude the other.”

Charest was expected to launch his bid for the leadership this week.

This was the first time Charest, whose government created UPAC, has attacked UPAC so vigorously.

Last week, after the media was allowed to publish information about the investigation of Bibeau, Charest sent his own lawyer, Michel Massicotte, to present his case for dropping the investigation on Radio-Canada’s all-news RDI network.

“No one in Quebec doesn’t know that he is the subject of a police investigation,” Massicotte said.

Interviewer Isabelle Richer asked Massicotte to make clear he was speaking on behalf of Charest, which he did.

Massicotte said Charest was approached twice by the police and agreed both times to answer their questions. Police did not follow up on those interview requests, he said.

Instead, Massicotte said, information that Charest was under investigation was leaked to the media, suggesting police interests had launched a “trial by media” of Charest, frustrated they did not have evidence against him.

Massicotte said Charest did not follow the day-today financing operations of his party and if there were illegal practices, he did not know about them.

“Mr. Charest was not there.

“There is strictly nothing linking Mr. Charest to any illegal acts,” Massicotte said. “He is not a suspect.”

“It has been six years,” Massicotte said of the investigation of Bibeau, touching on Charest.

“Stop the investigation,” he said. “We co-operated. They did not reciprocate.”

In a statement Frédérick Gaudreau, Quebec’s anti-corruption commissioner, indicated that the investigation is still underway and would go ahead.

Charest testified in a close-door session of the Charbonneau Commission into construction industry corruption. He was not asked to testify in public.

Massicotte noted that one of the two Charbonneau commissioners, Renaud Lachance, said the commission was unable to link political contributions to contracts given.

Justice France Charbonneau differed with Lachance, and suggested further investigation would be appropriate.

The decision by the Supreme Court of Canada last week to refuse an appeal from Marc Bibeau, a Montreal businessman and fundraiser for the Quebec Liberals, who is under police investigation for alleged fraud, corruption and abuse of trust, did reveal that Charest is “implicated” in the case against Bibeau.

UPAC, Quebec’s anti-corruption police force, is investigating the possibility that in return for contributions to the Quebec Liberals, donating firms received government contracts.

UPAC’s Opération Mâchurer (to take a bite, to chew) began in April 2014.

There have been media leaks that Mâchurer was looking into the role of Charest, but the investigation has been delayed by Bilbeau’s ongoing legal battle to block access to his documents, on grounds of client-lawyer privilege.

Bibeau fought a media consortium seeking access to information presented in court by police to back up search warrant requests of Bibeau’s records in 2016.

He lost his case in Quebec Court, Quebec Superior Court and the Quebec Court of Appeal.

The Supreme Court’s refusal to consider Bibeau’s case means a media consortium, composed of La Presse, Quebecor and the Montreal Gazette, could publish information in the warrants.

“Among the persons implicated,” police Sergeant David Ouellet named Bibeau, Charest and Violette Trépanier, who was Quebec Liberal finance director, and Pierre Bibeau, a former party organizer.

None of those named face charges.

Ouellet is quoted in the warrant requests explaining that, “The Mâchurer operation was begun into the financing of the Quebec Liberal Party to demonstrate the privileged links between the QLP and large companies in Quebec who gave them financial support on a large scale.”

READ MORE: Quebec court to hear arguments to end trial of former deputy premier Nathalie Normandeau

Witnesses interviewed by the police said Charest was involved in party financing when he became Quebec Liberal leader in 1998 and Bibeau, who was also a close friend of Charest, became a party fundraiser.

Among the companies Bibeau tapped for donations to the party was the engineering firm SNC-Lavalin, whose employees gave $90,000 a year to the Liberals.

Several companies approached by Bibeau reimbursed individual employee contributions, in violation of Quebec’s party financing law, which only allows personal donations by Quebec voters, forbidding all corporate donations.

With the arrival of Riadh Ben Aissa as SNC-Lavalin vice president, contributions to Charest’s Liberals rose to $175,000, the warrants state.

Two executives of RSW, another engineering firm, told police in separate interviews that Bibeau had warned them RSW would lose Hydro-Québec contracts if they did not increase contributions to the Liberals.

Nathalie Normandeau, who was deputy Quebec premier under Charest, and five others face charges of fraud, corruption and breach of trust, with the prosecution alleging that companies making illegal campaign contributions to the Liberals were rewarded with government contracts.

Normandeau and her co-accused were arrested March 17, 2015.

Their trial has been delayed by defence allegations that media leaks make a fair trial impossible.

A seventh defendant pleaded guilty to a lesser charge of seeking illegal contributions.

Normandeau and her five remaining co-accused are seeking a suspension of their trial under the Supreme Court’s Jordan ruling, that a jury trial should be wrapped up in 30 months, a trial by judge alone in 18 months.