CWB, SWP and Oil for Food

[TOM4CWB]

Parsley;

I asked the CWB yesterday about the Iraq Oil for Food deal between the SWP and the CWB.

I got a VERY unsatisfactory answers... particularily from Chairman Ritter.

THe CWB's Brian Wittal went on for a little bit about how the CWB uses Agents of the Board to do Business with that part of the world... and that corruption was just part of selling grain in many parts of the world... which is... in as many words... why the CWB used SWP on this Iraq sale.

Then Chairman Ritter angrilly went off on a rant about the CWB not having anything to do with Iraq... or any wheat sales to Iraq... that they had absolutely nothing to do with it... bla bla bla.

All I want is the truth about this file... and Chairman Ritter WAS NOT telling me the truth!

I believe it is time for an investigation.

Don't we deserve the truth?

[furrowtickler]

Keep stiring the pot tom, good on you.

[parsley]

Ok. So, According to the CWB, it's a given that Corruption underlies these sales?

Iraq was keen to buy. The CWB is supposedly keen to sell. Why didn't the CWB make the sale themselves? Direct?

Why did an accredited agency get the sale?

Is Brian Wittal saying that the CWB does not sell directly to Corrupt countries (Gov't to Gov't)?

Why this decision? Is it because:

1. The Accreditiated Agencies are better at dealing with corruption OR

2.The CWB wants to LOOK snow white OR

3. The sale is immaterial. The Government only uses the "wheat sale" as a springboard for other purposes OR

4. The CWB/Gov't has no presence in these countries to make any sales happen OR

5. The Accredited Agencies actually run the show.OR

What is the Board saying? Any ideas?

SWP sold to Iraq and SWP could not have exported to Iraq without the CWB's export license.

Of course, Australia Wheat Board wouldn't give any information out to begin with either. Until their CEO got hauled up in court.


Parsley

[TOM4CWB]

Parsley;

I must assume many claim the grading issue was key to the problems... like the iron filings in the Australian shipments... that didn't exist?

Here is what I dug up...

The congressional hearing in which the Saskatchewan Wheat Pool was mentioned Thursday saw BNP Paribas, the bank the UN used to broker deals in the oil-for-food program, acknowledge it improperly made 403 payments to third parties or their banks rather than to companies approved by the UN to deliver goods for Iraq.
Four of those payments are listed as going to the Saskatchewan Wheat Pool from 1999- 2000, total value $23.15 million, and another two went to a Canadian-registered company called Limpex Trading in 2001, total value $124.1 million.
No allegation of corruption has surfaced, but congressional officials want to know more about the payments.
Officials of the Pool, Saskatchewan's largest grain handler and marketer, say that "as an accredited exporter for the Canadian Wheat Board," the Pool sent wheat to Iraq at that time.
They explain five vessels carried the shipments under the oil-for-food program, which the UN launched in late 1996 as a way to provide food and medicine to ordinary Iraqis as it pressed sanctions against the Saddam regime over weapons inspections.
"We received all the required verified approvals, and I have no reason to question the documentation wasn't valid," Mayo Schmidt, chief executive officer of the Saskatchewan Wheat Pool, said Friday in an interview.
"We disclosed in our annual report of 2000 that there were shipments to Iraq. In fact, we ended up suffering an $8.7-million loss because portions of the CWB wheat were rejected, and there were costs related to unloading delays and the transfer of the wheat to alternative buyers."

"there were costs related to unloading delays and the transfer of the wheat to alternative buyers."

What was this all about?

What are the facts about the CWB role in this issue?

WHo did the grain end up going to; What was the final grade... was the problem real or an "iron filings" type of dispute?

[katoe]

TOM Ritter ranting? Sounded to me the only one ranting was you .

[TOM4CWB]

Katoe;

We are about to embark on a new chapter with Iraq.

It would be really nice to start with a clean slate.

Do you really think SWP got treated fairly?

I really suspect that they were hung out to dry... like would have happened with the iron filings with the Ausie wheat shipments.

If this turns out to be the case:

Shouldn't this be settled fairly?

[TOM4CWB]

Katoe... where are you...

Obviously something is going on here!

[TOM4CWB]

Unreliable memoirs fail to excite
Email Print Normal font Large font By David Marr
February 28, 2006

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AdvertisementLEAVE a tractor out in the weather too long and it's damn hard to start. So it is with Trevor Flugge's recollection. The Cole people tried jumper leads. No luck. They primed the carburettor, but after coughing once or twice the engine died. Tomorrow they'll have to strip the block.

Flugge was a disappointment from the start yesterday. First he disappointed the large contingent of cameras waiting in Market Street by turning up in a shirt and tie with no visible side-arms. Then he disappointed the packed room of the Cole inquiry where, until about 3.45pm, there was some lingering expectation that the former chairman of AWB would talk.

That hope died swiftly as counsel assisting the inquiry, John Agius, SC, began to quiz him about the early days of the kickback story. Up on the screens around the room flashed half a dozen documents showing that the key issue on a trip Flugge led to Baghdad in October 1999 was bedding down the new "trucking fees" to be paid on 700,000 tonnes of wheat heading for Iraq.

But the very little Flugge could remember about those days in Baghdad included none of those details. He did recall a technical seminar and lunch afterwards, but not being briefed for the journey; nor ever discussing "trucking fees" on the trip; nor being at the crucial meeting with Iraqi officials that two of his colleagues have given unequivocal evidence he attended.

Other witnesses have grovelled as their memories failed them. Flugge chuckled. In a man-to-man kind of way he told Agius he'd been working with his lawyers for weeks to try to jog his memory. No luck. "If a trip report can be shown that this is what we did, this is what we were briefed on, then so be it. My recollection doesn't take me there."

With light scorn Agius replied: "I appreciate you will admit it if you see it in writing."

Flugge let the laughter brush over him. He's a compact man with more hair than most senior AWB executives. He doesn't have the weatherbeaten face of the wheat farmer he's been most of his life, but he has the voice: a nasal drawl that must be all but impossible to stop in the boondocks or at board meetings. Sentences come out of the man like road trains.

Yet his memory fails him. In March 2000, Austrade's Alistair Nicholas called Flugge and several of his colleagues to Washington to discuss Canadian complaints that AWB was paying kickbacks to the Iraqis.

This meeting was to spark urgent inquiries with the United Nations and provoke very careful denials by AWB channelled through the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade - but the chairman of AWB could remember nothing at all about the occasion that might help Terence Cole's inquiries.

His mantra was a bushman's complaint about the picky ways of the city: "Aw, Mr Agius, with respect."

And the CWB knew nothing about it. Right

I wonder, how...