Bribes probe blasts AWB culture

Mark Davis

Legal authorities should consider criminal prosecutions against AWB Ltd and senior company executives including former chairman Trevor Flugge, the inquiry into AWB’s bribery of Saddam Hussein’s regime has found.

The 2065-page report by Commissioner Terence Cole, tabled in federal parliament this afternoon, named 11 senior AWB executives whose conduct may have involved being accessories to criminal behaviour or breaching the Corporations Act.

In addition to Mr Flugge, the report named executives Mark Emons, Peter Geary, Dominic Hogan, Paul Ingleby, Michael Long, Nigel Officer, Murray Rogers, Charles Stott, Michael Watson and Jim Cooper.

But Commissioner Cole found that evidence presented to his inquiry did not implicate the Prime Minster John Howard and senior government ministers or officials in AWB’s payment of $290 million in kickbacks to Hussein’s regime.

“There is no evidence that any of the Prime Minister, the Minister for Foreign Affairs, the Minister for Trade or the Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry were ever informed about, or otherwise acquired knowledge of, the relevant activities of AWB,” the report said.

Tabling the report, the Attorney-General Philip Ruddock said the government had accepted Commissioner Cole’s recommendation that it should establish a task force of government agencies to consider possible prosecutions in consultation with the Director of Public Prosecutions.

He said the government would also consider recommendations to tighten Australia’s domestic legal arrangements for enforcing United Nations sanctions, including recommendations.

AWB paid the kickbacks to Iraqi government agencies to ensure that it continued winning contracts to supply Australian wheat to the country under the United Nations “oil for food” sanctions imposed on the country.

Commissioner Cole sheeted the blame for AWB’s series of illicit payments to the company’s internal corporate culture.

“The question posed within AWB was: ‘What must be done to maintain sales to Iraq’.

“The answer given was: ‘Do whatever is necessary to retain the trade’.

“No one asked, ‘What is the right thing to do?”’

Commissioner Cole said AWB used subterfuges to devise ways of paying the kickbacks to the Iraqi rEgime and then sought to hide its conduct from the Federal Government and the United Nations.

“Necessarily one asks, ‘Why?’ The answer is a closed culture of superiority and impregnability, of dominance and self-importance,” the report said.