Dirty Aussies

Ever since it turned out that Howard had lied to the people of Australia over the ‘refugees throwing their children overborad as they were boarded by the Australian Navy’ – when Howard knew full well that wasn’t the case, and he only did it to reap xenophobic Australian votes (which in turn won him the elctection) – I’ve always thought Howard was dirty. The lastest findings in the report into AWB giving kickbacks to Saddm with full knowledge of Government officials is shocking only in its audacity.

Howard braced for onslaught over report into oil-for-food scandal
CANBERRA - The Australian Government is likely next week to face a barrage of criticism over the oil-for-food scandal that has cost the nation the big Iraqi wheat market and threatens the future of its monopoly grains trader.

Although the report of the inquiry into the scandal is understood to have cleared senior Government ministers and officials of complicity, Commissioner Terence Cole is believed to be highly critical of Canberra's failure to heed warnings of wrongdoing.

Cole handed the report to Governor-General Michael Jeffery yesterday. It will be tabled next week.

The report's conclusions and recommendations are secret but the tenor of the inquiry and the nature of the evidence presented during the 75 days of hearings point to serious flaws in Canberra's oversight of grain trader AWB's dealings with the regime of former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein.

AWB paid about A$290 million ($335 million) in kickbacks to Iraq to obtain wheat contracts under the United Nations' corruption-ridden oil-for-food scheme, set up to allow essential humanitarian supplies into the country during the trade embargo imposed after the first Gulf War.

The payments were funnelled through a Jordanian trucking company established as a front by the regime, and continued as Australia was preparing to join the United States and Britain in invading Iraq.

They were publicly exposed in a UN inquiry into the oil-for-food scandal, unleashing a long series of revelations damning the AWB and its senior management and seriously embarrassing the Government.

As a result, the AWB lost the Iraq market at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars, and is likely to lose its long-held monopoly as single-desk exporter of Australian wheat.

The Cole report is likely to recommend prosecution of a number of senior AWB officials, including former chairman Trevor Flugge, later appointed by Prime Minister John Howard as the Government's senior agricultural adviser in Baghdad.

The list of possible charges includes breaches of federal criminal law, fraud and obstruction of Government officials and money laundering.