Wheat to Saddam bribe inquiry due out
An Australian inquiry into alleged multimillion dollar bribes paid to export wheat to former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein is expected to recommend criminal charges against several senior executives.
Prime minister John Howard ordered the investigation after the bribes were exposed as the largest suspect payments in the UN’s corruption-riddled Iraq oil-for-food scheme.
His government is expected to escape censure in the final report, which will be handed to the government today but be made public when it is presented in Parliament next week.
The inquiry report, however, still has the potential to do severe political damage to Howard, a staunch Washington ally in Iraq, who is due to face an election next year.
The government appointed retired judge Terence Cole to look deeper into findings by former US Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker’s investigation into the oil-for-food programme that Australian wheat exporter AWB made hundreds of millions in illegal ”side payments” to Saddam’s regime between 1999-2003.
AWB executives authorised US$222m (€123.7m) in bogus transport fees to a Jordanian trucking company part-owned by Saddam’s government, Volcker found. Payments to Saddam were strictly forbidden under UN sanctions imposed on Baghdad after the 1990 invasion of Kuwait.
In documents and testimony to Cole, AWB officials did not deny making the payments, but said they had no reason to believe the trucking fees were not legitimate or that they violated sanctions.
However, internal documents and e-mails presented to the inquiry suggest some AWB officials knew the fees were illegal and approved them anyway to secure lucrative oil-for-food contracts.
Cole’s government-given mandate was to examine only whether AWB executives - not government officials – broke the law.
The lawyer assisting the inquiry, John Agius, submitted to Cole that more than a dozen former AWB executives could be open to criminal and civil action on a range of offences including fraud, money laundering, breaches of company law and tax breaches, The Sydney Morning Herald reported.
Political scientist Richard Mulgan said the report was likely to contain no significant findings against the government.
“It’s possible there may be questions … about why further investigations were not made when the alarm bells started to ring,” said Mulgan, from the Australian National University. But, “investigating the government’s culpability was always incidental to finding out more about AWB’s culpability".
AWB received around $2.3bn (€1.4bn) UN payments under the programme, which allowed Iraq to sell oil for humanitarian goods using the world body as an intermediary.
Howard, Foreign Minister Alexander Downer and former Trade Minister Mark Vaile were called to testify before the inquiry in April – rare appearances by leaders at such an inquiry.
The were questioned about 21 diplomatic cables sent from Australian officials at the UN and in the Middle East warning that AWB may have been making illegal payments. Howard, Downer and Vaile all denied ever seeing the cables or having any knowledge that AWB was breaking the UN sanctions.
Downer yesterday declined to answer questions about the Cole report, but appeared confident it would clear the government of wrongdoing.
“All of the theories that people have, whether they’re conspiracy theories, whether they’re accurate, inaccurate, wrong, lies, whatever they are, that will all be transparent for people to see next week,” Downer said.
