Ottawa, Canada: A Canadian senator at the centre of a spending scandal on Monday accused the prime minister’s office and his own Tory party of scripting his lines in an alleged cover-up.

Senator Mike Duffy and two others appointed to the upper chamber by Prime Minister Stephen Harper are being targeted for suspension over what an audit revealed were “troubling” expense claims.

Duffy is also being investigated by federal police for having accepted a C$90,000 (Dh316,850) cheque from Harper’s chief of staff to help the lawmaker repay funds he had claimed as Senate expenses.

Duffy now alleges a “set-up planned by the Senate leadership under the direction of the PMO [prime minister’s office] and designed to destroy my credibility with Canadians if and when I ever went public with the real story behind the C$90,000.”

He said in his four and a half years as a senator, officials had found that he’d overcharged the Senate for a total of C$437.35, which he repaid.

But public outcry grew louder over the Ottawa resident’s separate claim of a housing allowance - typically available to senators who live outside Ottawa in order to maintain a second home in the capital for work.

Duffy said the prime minister’s office hatched a “nefarious scheme” to repay those funds for him.

Harper’s right-hand man Nigel Wright resigned in May when it was revealed that he actually paid back the C$90,000 on Duffy’s behalf.

Duffy revealed now that Wright also “arranged to have my legal fees paid... there were two cheques, at least two cheques.”

“The PMO - the PMO, listen to this - had the Conservative Party’s lawyer, Arthur Hamilton, pay my legal fees. He paid for my lawyer, Arthur Hamilton, a cheque for C$13,560. That’s right Senators, not one payment, but two.”

“Why would he do that? He would never do it if he believed my expense claims were improper. He did this... because it was all part of his strategy, negotiated by his lawyers and the Conservative party’s lawyers to make a political situation embarrassing to his base go away.

“He took their money, I suspect, I can’t prove it yet, I suspect he took their money, the base’s money to pay off a lawyer to make this all go away. The cheques tell who is telling the truth, and who is not.”

Duffy also alluded to emails detailing negotiations between his, the prime minister’s and the Tory party’s lawyers over the scheme, showing “back and forth as the PMO lawyers check with their principle on the language that would be used to direct the future actions of Senator Lebreton (Tory Senate leader) and others in the Conservative party leadership” to go along with the plan.

As part of the scheme, Duffy said he was told to respond, if asked by reporters where he got the C$90,000 to repay the Senate, that he took out a bank loan, that it was part of a “script” written for him by the prime minister’s office.

“When the media ask, where did you get the money to pay the C$90,000 the PMO told me to say, ‘My wife and I took out a loan at the Royal Bank’,” Duffy said.

“That line was written by the PMO to deceive Canadians as to the real source of the C$90,000.”