Michael Danby (Melbourne Ports, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

The Australian Wheat Board’s $300 million of illegal bribes to the former Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein was paid into general revenue for the Iraqi regime. It was the only source of discretionary money they had at that time. It was a deliberate policy of the United Nations to see that they did not have discretionary money. Of course, despite the argument of my friend Greg Sheridan, the foreign editor of the Australian today, all of this money was fungible—it was paid into the Rafidain Bank, as we know, by Alia. This is not disputed by the Australian Wheat Board, a private company which enjoys the legal monopoly over Australian wheat exports. It paid $300 million to Alia Transport and General Trade, a company owned by the Khawams, a wealthy Iraqi family—as any minister would have found out if they had looked—with close connections to the Saddam regime. It was based in Amman—another legal fiction to preserve the blind eye to the telescope of this government. These payments were made despite the fact that Alia did not have any role in unloading or transporting the Australian wheat to Iraq but was purely a conduit for these corrupt payments, as AWB’s management would well have known: the trucking company with no trucks. I am sure, blind eye to the telescope, deaf ear to their ear trumpets, the ministers probably had the same understanding but legally did not know, as seems to be the implication of the Cole commission that the ministers are constantly referring to—they legally did not know.

Nor is it disputed that these funds were deposited by Alia in the Amman branch of the Rafidain Bank, an Iraqi state bank controlled by the Saddam regime. This is the same bank from which the Iraqi ambassador to Jordan withdrew funds to be passed to the Arab Liberation Front. The Arab Liberation Front is a longstanding 30-year Iraqi faction of the PLO. It handed out those $25,000 cheques. We had an infamous interview yesterday morning, and I congratulate Mark Willacy from the ABC for finding the man who handed out these cheques from the Rafidain Bank. He said—and the two members opposite should pay close attention to this—that he was not sure at all that the money did not come from Australia. He did not know.

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