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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: cnyndwllr who wrote (181227)	2/6/2006 2:51:39 AM
From: 2MAR$	Respond to of 281500

Feb 5th No Work for Oil-for-Food Cash SYDNEY, Australia - A trucking company owned in part by Saddam Hussein's government said Monday it did not move a single grain of Australian wheat under the now disgraced U.N. oil-for-food-program, despite receiving millions of dollars in transport fees. news.yahoo.com The disclosure came in the fourth week of hearings into whether Australia's monopoly wheat exporter, AWB Ltd., knowingly paid up to $222 million in kickbacks to the Iraqi government in order to secure lucrative wheat contracts. AWB paid the money to Alia Transport, a Jordanian trucking company part-owned by Saddam's government, to transport the wheat into Iraq between 1999-2003. Investigators say the money was never used for transport, but was funneled into the former dictator's coffers in violation of U.N. sanctions under the program. In a written statement, Alia General Manager Othman Al Absi told the inquiry that his company moved no Australian wheat into Iraq. He said that the country was considered too dangerous for his company's trucks and drivers, and that the transport was instead handled by a private company contracted by Iraq's Transport Ministry. However, Alia continued to charge AWB because it had signed a contract with the Iraq State Company for Water Transport to collect the fees on behalf of Saddam's government. Al Absi said he could not recall anyone from AWB ever asking whether it was Alia's trucks that were moving Australian wheat in Iraq, or whether the company had any connections to the Iraqi government Documents before the inquiry allege AWB began paying Alia a fee of $12 for every ton of wheat shipped into Iraq in 1999, but the transportation costs skyrocketed 400 percent to more than $48 by 2003. According to a U.N. report issued last year, AWB sold 6.8 million tons of wheat to Iraq and received more than $2.3 billion in payments from the United Nations in 1997-2003. The Australian inquiry's lawyer, John Agius, has suggested AWB paid the fees to maintain its lucrative wheat contracts in Iraq, even as Saddam was threatening to cut the contract because of Australia's support for the United States. Senior AWB officials have not denied making the payments, but some have suggested they had no reason to believe the trucking fees were bogus or that they violated U.N. sanctions. A statement issued by AWB last month said the company had "no obligation" to ensure that Alia was actually delivering the wheat. The inquiry was called after an independent commission, led by former U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker, found that AWB had made "side payments" to Alia that were "tantamount to payments to the government of Iraq."