Ortiz described for the grand jury a meeting he had with Kramer and Celona at CVS headquarters before Celona was hired. Ortiz said that he asked Celona if his working for CVS would be okay with the Rhode Island Ethics Commission.

``I had a bad feeling about what he was proposing,’’ Ortiz testified. ``It just didn’t, it didn’t smell right.’’

Mirroring prior testimony in this trial, Ortiz told the grand jury that Celona responded that he had spoken to the Ethics Commission, and it would be ``no problem.’’ Ortiz said that he never pursued the matter further, and went ahead and drafted and signed a consulting agreement with Celona.

Ortiz said that Celona never gave him any formal reports on what he was doing for CVS, other than occasional e-mails mentioning a particular newspaper article or asking if Ortiz had seen Celona’s cable-access television show. Celona never mentioned any visits to talk to senior citizens about CVS services, Ortiz testified.

Ortiz also testified that he was concerned about Celona’s hiring because the senator served on an important committee that heard pharmacy-related legislation affecting a large part of CVS’s business.

The state prosecutor asked whether Ortiz was troubled just by ``the fear of bad publicity’’ or also ``that this might just be wrong?’’

Ortiz responded that ``everything about it, it was, you know, the bad publicity, but, you know, I didn’t think it was right.’’

Ortiz also testified that he never asked Celona to sponsor legislation benefiting CVS, although he didn’t know whether CVS’s lobbyists ever had. That testimony has been contradicted by evidence in this trial, including e-mails between Celona and Ortiz regarding legislation.

When court resumes next week, Chief U.S. District Judge Mary M. Lisi will also have before her a defense motion, filed Wednesday, seeking a mistrial based on assertions that prosecutors knowingly solicited false testimony from Celona this week. Barring that, the defense asks that the judge disallow Celona’s testimony on a crucial point: his purported conversation with the Rhode Island Ethics Commission.

Celona testified this week that he didn’t identify CVS as his prospective employer when he spoke to someone at the Ethics Commission prior to his hiring, and that he didn’t subsequently discuss that conversation with Kramer, but just Ortiz. The defense motion cites Celona’s prior testimony in the Roger Williams Medical Center corruption trial that he did identify CVS to the Ethics Commission and that he told Kramer as well as Ortiz.