no such thing as a bribe in the middle east

An international lawyer says Australia is shooting itself in the foot over its inquiry into kickback allegations against wheat exporter AWB.

Andrew Farren says lawyers who were meeting in London with a member of the UN's Volker committee were amazed at the political furore surrounding the hearing.

Mr Farren, also a former Australian diplomatic service staffer, says if AWB engineered kickbacks under the UN oil-for-food program, it was not doing anything out of the ordinary.

"Over 2,050 companies dealt with Iraq during this period and I'd say a good many of them must have done exactly the same thing because they would not have got business had they not played the game according to the way it was conducted in Iraq," he said.

"And why was it conducted that way? One, it has always been conducted that way. Two is that part of the compromise of the United Nations oil-for-food program gave the Saddam Hussein government the right to accept and refuse contracts."

Mr Farren says most countries accept that such payments are part of the way business is done in Iraq.

"As for the term kickbacks of bribery or whatever, people in the Middle East tell me that the notion of bribery is really unknown there, it's not in their languages," he said.

"What we might consider as a bribe, they regard as a conventional and normal way of conducting commerce."

Dave R.