Oil-For-Wheat

April 2005 SDA flashback;

The [US] congressional hearing in which the Saskatchewan Wheat Pool was mentioned Thursday saw BNP Paribas, the bank the UN used to broker deals in the oil-for-food program, acknowledge it improperly made 403 payments to third parties or their banks rather than to companies approved by the UN to deliver goods for Iraq. Four of those payments are listed as going to the Saskatchewan Wheat Pool from 1999- 2000, total value $23.15 million, and another two went to a Canadian-registered company called Limpex Trading in 2001, total value $124.1 million. No allegation of corruption has surfaced, but congressional officials want to know more about the payments. Officials of the Pool, Saskatchewan's largest grain handler and marketer, say that "as an accredited exporter for the Canadian Wheat Board," the Pool sent wheat to Iraq at that time. They explain five vessels carried the shipments under the oil-for-food program, which the UN launched in late 1996 as a way to provide food and medicine to ordinary Iraqis as it pressed sanctions against the Saddam regime over weapons inspections. "We received all the required verified approvals, and I have no reason to question the documentation wasn't valid," Mayo Schmidt, chief executive officer of the Saskatchewan Wheat Pool, said Friday in an interview. "We disclosed in our annual report of 2000 that there were shipments to Iraq. In fact, we ended up suffering an $8.7-million loss because portions of the CWB wheat were rejected, and there were costs related to unloading delays and the transfer of the wheat to alternative buyers."

Fast forward to Feb 2, 2006 - (Australia);

KERRY O'BRIEN: Welcome to the program. Evidence at the inquiry into allegations of AWB kickbacks to Saddam Hussein has been sounding more and more ominous as each day's evidence has emerged. Today's news was more a vicious kick in the teeth for the Wheat Board, and a growing political mess for the Government, after former AWB executive Mark Emons took the stand. He told the Cole inquiry illicit payments had been going to Iraq to facilitate Australian wheat sales for years, even back to when it was still a statutory Government authority in 1999. In earlier evidence today another still-current AWB executive, Michael Long, told the inquiry he had discovered when he was in Baghdad for the Howard Government immediately after the war in June 2003, that the AWB had been involved in kickbacks to Iraq. The Federal Government has maintained throughout the inquiry that it knew nothing of any kickbacks to Saddam Hussein's Iraq and, so far, the Government has resisted Opposition calls for the terms of reference to be widened to investigate what Government bureaucrats and ministers might have known about the scandal. But Commissioner Terrence Cole now plans to make a statement about "the scope of the terms of reference and associated matters" tomorrow morning. Nick Grimm reports.

NICK GRIMM: There's been plenty of explosive evidence to date, but those watching the Oil-for-Food Inquiry had been anticipating the mother of all bombshells still to come. This was it - a senior insider turned whistleblower. Former AWB executive Mark Emons today emerged to tell how knowledge of bribes and kickbacks went all the way to the very top of the Australian wheat exporter. The effort to conceal payments to Saddam Hussein's regime beginning when the organisation was still under Federal Government control, as Mark Emons explained to counsel assisting the inquiry, John Agius.

[...]

NICK GRIMM: But according to Mark Emons, Trevor Flugge was also one of those at the AWB who were fully aware that from 1998, Iraq had suddenly demanded to be paid an additional US$12 on every tonne of wheat imported. AWB was then said to be instructed to find a way to pay that money through an intermediary. [...] The senior management of AWB have always maintained they did not know that $300 million charged for the transportation of Australian wheat inside Iraq was, in fact, going to the Iraqi regime in a direct breach of United Nations sanctions. But Mark Emons claimed the so-called transportation fees were common knowledge among grains traders.

So, here is what we are asked believe - that a) it was "common knowledge among grains traders" that kickbacks to Saddam Hussein were a cost of doing business under the oil-for-food program, and b) Canadian grain traders were exempt.