The Australian Wheat Board Ltd has been implicated in the payment of a $222 million bribe to former Iraqi tyrant Saddam Hussein.
The AWB are offering the Sergeant Schultz defence "It knew nothing." But it's denial leaves more questions unanswered.
VOLCKER SAYS AWB KNEW ALL ABOUT IT Former US Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker disagreed, saying that some AWB executives knew that the $222 million payment was being funnelled illegally to an Iraqi Government agency for the use of Saddam Hussein.
It paid $222 million to a Jordanian company to truck wheat but managed to not squeeze in any trucking services at all, an arrangement that puts complaints about the sweet deal Sol Lew cut with Linfox when he was running Coles Myer into perspective. It says it did not suspect anything wrong despite "transport costs" quadrupling in the space of a few years. Yeah right.
"The evidence does not suffice to conclude that AWB had actual knowledge of Alia's partial ownership by the Government of Iraq, that it had actual knowledge of the fact that Alia did not actually perform trucking services for AWB's wheat, or that it had actual knowledge of the fact that Alia remitted the payments it received from AWB to the Government of Iraq," the report said.
"On the other hand ... numerous documentary and circumstantial warning signs placed at least some employees of AWB on notice that payments to Alia may have been illicitly funding the Iraqi regime."
AWB is a privately owned company but it has a statutory monopoly still over wheat exports and marketing.
AWB PAMPERED BY NATIONAL PARTY FAVOURS This is a massive public benefit bestowed on them in a very dodgy National Party style arrangement anyway. The country deserved much better from a company so privileged.
Their involvement in funding the world's worst living former dictator is a national disgrace and humiliation.
It makes us no better than the conniving and despicable French.
The AWB had worked hard on sucking up to the former Iraqi Baathist regime. It clearly went too far in doing so and in so doing have blackened the good name of Australia.
The report by Volcker also exposed some of the biggest names of European business such as DaimlerChrysler, Siemens and Volvo for their involvement in bribing Saddam.
The Howard Government scrambled to defend their business buddies and National Party comrades and of course Labor's Gavan O'Connor, Agriculture spokesman has done nothing, said nothing and achieved nothing on the biggest issue of the year in Australian agriculture.
All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men and women to do nothing.
Game on.
posted by Andrew Landeryou
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