KICKBACKS paid by Australia's monopoly wheat exporter to the regime of Saddam Hussein were put into a bank account used to finance a $US10million ($13 million) slush fund for families of Palestinian suicide bombers.| We knew about the payouts but we didn't know the source. |
According to a US inquiry into the corrupt UN oil-for-food program, companies such as Jordanian firm Alia, which received hundreds of millions of dollars from Australian wheat exporter AWB, paid money into "front" accounts held under false names. These accounts were then emptied each evening into Iraqi Government accounts at the same bank and used for its international transactions.
Alia, which AWB says it thought was a trucking company, provided 15 per cent of the kickbacks uncovered by the investigation into rorting of the oil-for-food program. "According to information provided to this committee, Saddam paid $US25,000 rewards to the families of Palestinian suicide bombers through the Iraqi ambassador to Jordan," Republican congressman Henry Hyde, chairman of the US House of Representatives committee on international relations, told an oil-for-food hearing in November last year.