OTTAWA — Former prime minister Brian Mulroney broke his own ethics code, engaged in inappropriate behaviour and evaded the truth for years by purposely concealing hefty cash payments he got from lobbyist Karlheinz Schreiber, a federal inquiry judge has found.

Justice Jeffrey Oliphant also concluded Monday there is no credible evidence Mulroney performed any services for the $300,000 that Schreiber said he paid him in three instalments in 1993 and 1994 to lobby on behalf of a plan to build armoured vehicles in Canada for export.

Oliphant's scathing indictment of Mulroney's conduct was released Monday in a four-volume report that stopped short of accusing the former prime minister of lying under oath in a 1996 hearing about his relationship with Schreiber, but cut him little slack on almost all the main issues.

The major exceptions were Oliphant's finding that Mulroney did not reach a deal to work with Schreiber while he was still prime minister on June 23, 1993, as Schreiber alleged, and that his job was to lobby internationally, and not domestically as Schreiber alleged.

Mulroney, who watched Oliphant's televised statement from Toronto, said in a statement he was "pleased" by those conclusions.

"I genuinely regret that my conduct after I left office gave rise to suspicions about the propriety of my personal business affairs as a private citizen," he added.

"I will leave it to others to assess the full impact of these events. For now, I am merely grateful that this unfortunate chapter is over and that my family and I can move forward with our lives."

That may be wishful thinking. Oliphant's findings have already spurred renewed opposition calls for the government to move to recover the $2.1 million Mulroney got in an out-of-court settlement of a libel suit over allegations he had received millions of dollars in kickbacks in the so-called Airbus affair.

Oliphant said Schreiber's three cash payments to Mulroney couldn't be written off simply as an "error in judgment," as Mulroney has argued, because it happened on "three distinct" occasions.

"The conduct exhibited by Mr. Mulroney in accepting cash-stuffed envelopes from Mr. Schreiber on three separate occasions, failing to record the fact of the cash payments, failing to deposit the cash into a bank or other financial institution, and failing to disclose the fact of the cash payments when given the opportunity to do so goes a long way, in my view to supporting my position that the financial dealings between Mr. Schreiber and Mr. Mulroney were inappropriate," he said.

Mulroney said he received $225,000, not $300,000 as Schreiber testified, and admitted he waited seven years to declare the income to tax authorities. Oliphant said he could not determine which dollar figure was correct, but he clearly didn't consider the dollar value as important as what it said about Mulroney's conduct.

Quoting the ethics standard Mulroney demanded of his own ministers when he was in power, Oliphant said the former prime minister's dealings with Schreiber "do not reflect the highest standards of conduct, nor do they represent conduct that is so scrupulous it will bear the closest public scrutiny."