Alexander Downer (Mayo, Liberal Party, Minister for Foreign Affairs) Share this | Hansard source

There are a lot of questions in that question. Let me make the simple point—and by the way, I am not verifying the words that have been put in my mouth by counsel representing somebody who is representing someone in the Cole commission; indeed, the last thing I am going to do is get into an ongoing debate with people in the Cole commission about who said what, why, when and where and the exact words they used—that at no time did the government believe, including at that time and including later that year, that AWB Ltd had knowingly and wittingly paid bribes to Saddam Hussein’s regime and that by paying the Jordanian trucking company, AWB Ltd had knowingly been doing so in order to pay bribes to Saddam Hussein’s regime. They maintained the position that they had not been knowingly doing that right up until the beginning of the Cole commission.

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