Is the CWB Guilty of "Dropping the Bundle"?

[TOM4CWB]

Incognito and Craig,

DO you remember this article?

"Dropping the bundle

Page 1 of 3 | Single page

Australia might have nipped the Iraq wheat scandal in the bud if it had chosen to look
more closely at what was not being said, writes David Marr.

THIS is bullshit," said the man from AWB and that was good enough for the
Government.

In late January 2000, Canberra was moving in a leisurely way to deal with allegations
coming from deep within the United Nations that the national wheat trader AWB was
sanctions busting.

Disbelief greeted the charge when it reached Bob Bowker, head of the Department of
Foreign Affairs and Trade's Middle East branch, in the middle of the month. He reassured
Australian diplomats in New York: "We think it unlikely that AWB would be involved
knowingly in any form of payment in breach of the sanctions regime."

Why was he so certain? Because the month before, AWB had assured him it was "fully
aware of, and respected, Australian Government obligations and UN Security Council
sensitivities and would act accordingly".

We know now - and AWB executives knew then - that this was a lie. At this time, AWB
was paying its first corrupt "trucking fees" to Iraq. The system that would eventually yield
Saddam Hussein's regime a fortune in bribes and kickbacks was in its very early days.
What follows is the story of Australia's failure to nip the whole system in the bud.

What Canberra had learnt by cable from its UN mission was that Iraq was pressuring a
"third country" - easily identified as Canada - to make payments "outside the oil-for-food
program". Iraq was claiming these payments were already being made by AWB.

It was absolutely true.

Her message to Canberra was that once AWB gave the UN a copy of its "standard terms
and conditions", the crisis would pass.

[…]

AWB had a more nuanced understanding: Canada had also to be squared away. In the
days after the Washington meeting, McConville and Flugge flew north to meet Canadian
Wheat Board officials over breakfast in Winnipeg, and executives of the Saskatchewan
Wheat Pool at a transit hotel at Vancouver Airport.

Though a haze of amnesia descended on these men when they appeared before the
Cole inquiry, it's clear they were mounting a big effort to ingratiate the AWB with the
Canadians, who had an immediate problem: as part of its effort to force them to pay
"trucking fees", Iraq was refusing to unload Canadian ships.

Australia was there to help. Snowball jotted a note in his diary: "Trevor wants to keep
alongside them - see if we could help them … mkts to put the cargoes into."

What happened there is unknown, but it is clear that Canada, which had been pursuing
its complaints against Australia fairly vigorously, let them drop. Over the following year,
Canada was to send a further 300,000 tonnes of wheat to Iraq through an "accredited
exporter". None of those ships would have been landed without paying "trucking fees".
[…]
Cole will have to decide if this was an appalling oversight, a brilliant snow job or a superb
bureaucratic operation in defence of an iconic Australian corporation. The result was the
same: AWB would pay almost $300 million in bribes to Saddam."

[TOM4CWB]

Lee,

Wouldn't it be more properly asked...

Is the Liberal Government in power who knew... about the AWB bribes... Guilty of "Dropping the Bundle"?

The Liberal's best "trouble shooter"

Ralph Goodale himself... I bet...

was involved!

Didn't some call him "Mr. Teflon"?
[see end of Cole transcripts pg 52-53]!

[TOM4CWB]

Wheat becomes bargaining chip on way to war
February 11, 2006
UN sanctions were a thorn in the side for Australia's wheat marketing authority from the outset, writes David Marr.

MICHAEL Long waited for hours at the Al Rashid Hotel for the minister's call. It came at 10pm. Mohammed Mehdi Saleh had been Iraq's minister for trade since before the first Gulf War. But this June 2002 meeting in Baghdad was Long's first with a man AWB had been dealing with for years.
"The minister was dressed in full military regalia, he was armed," Long told Terence Cole's oil-for-food inquiry. "I counted some 17 posters of Saddam Hussein staring down at me, and it was a particularly stressful environment, particularly when we were being hauled over the coals for the position of the Australian Government."
As the war grew closer, demands that AWB help Saddam's regime grew more insistent. At these appalling meetings in dictatorship Baghdad, AWB declared its neutrality, insisted on its friendliness, promised to lobby, paid the bribes and kept wheat ships steaming from Australia. After another of these bruising encounters with Saleh, the AWB's Dominic Hogan reported home: "Minister and Iraqi Grains Board both made positive comments regarding the lobbying by AWB of the Australian Government position and they also commented on the satisfaction they felt regarding the position (recent protests) of the Australian people."
What that lobbying might have been is not a subject for the Cole inquiry. But the United Nations investigator Paul Volcker made it clear in his report last year that an underlying principle of the scandal was that Iraq chose who to do business with, and preferred to deal with friends - essentially those it believed "could influence foreign policy and international public opinion in its favour".
Australian wheat farmers have been insisting ever since this scandal broke that AWB was doing business as usual in Saddam's Baghdad. That's true in part, but from at least mid-1999, the Australian grain trader was demonstrating its friendliness to Saddam's regime - and securing half the immense wheat trade with Iraq - by busting sanctions. When sanctions failed, the next option chosen for dealing with Saddam was war.
SANCTIONS don't have a great track record. They failed to drive Mussolini from Ethiopia; Castro has survived them for more than 40 years. The collapse of apartheid is one of the few examples of sanctions working as planned. They failed against Saddam when he invaded Kuwait in 1990. The UN Security Council's Resolution 661 forbidding all trade with Iraq was designed to force Saddam back behind his own borders. When that didn't work, the first Gulf War followed.
For the Australian Wheat Board - an arm of the Australian Government - this was a particularly tricky time. Iraq was a hugely important market and had been for nearly 50 years. The board's chairman, Clinton Condon, gamely declared the war a "hiccup" and promised: "As soon as there is peace, I'll be back on the first plane in there to re-establish normal business and they are happy with that."
Because Iraq grows very little to feed its own people, sanctions had to be relaxed in April 1991 to allow trade in food. But otherwise the tough bans on trade, freezing of assets etc, remained. This was not blind revenge. The sanctions had a purpose: to compel Saddam to disarm. The Security Council spelt this out in rhetoric that would become increasingly familiar as the second Gulf War approached.
Sanctions were to remain until Iraq accepted the destruction under international supervision, of "all chemical and biological weapons and all stocks of agents and all related subsystems and components and all research, development, support and manufacturing facilities". Ditto ballistic missiles and nuclear weapons plants. The council directed every country in the world to police the sanctions "to maintain such national controls and procedures to ensure compliance". Few nations would fail as spectacularly as Australia.
Right from the start, the wheat board was among the public critics of the sanctions. The Australian Financial Review reported on the board's Middle East marketing manager, Charles Stott, in 1991. "Iraq's inability to pay was a stumbling block," the Review said. "He suggested that Iraqi oil exports, banned under UN sanctions, should be allowed to resume so Iraq could import food."
He was ahead of his time. But the board could keep doing business while Iraq's cash lasted. Sales had to be cash on the knocker. So the early 1990s saw that famous truckload of gold driven out of Iraq to buy 600,000 tonnes of fine Australian wheat. And the Cole inquiry has heard of huge sums of cash handed to Australian traders by the head of the Iraqi Grains Board. The AWB's Dominic Hogan told the inquiry: "Zuhair used to run large suitcases of cash and meet with AWB in Amman, Jordan, and put it into bank accounts."
By 1995, Iraq was so starved of cash that it opened its oil fields to foreigners. Anxious to enter the game, BHP sent over a shipload of wheat, with payment of $US5 million deferred for up to five years. The deal went ahead despite clear advice from the Department of Foreign Affairs that this was sanctions-busting. The hard men of the wheat board were infuriated: "This sanctimonious position is inhibiting our trading relationship with Iraq and has resulted in lost opportunities," wrote Stott in a 1995 email. "DFAT may be motived by the fact that [Gareth] Evans is rumoured to be seeking the penultimate UN job."
The Cole inquiry has seen evidence that the wheat traders and oil explorers connived in what's known as the Tigris deal, knowing the scheme broke the rules.
By 1996, Iraqis were starving in their millions. The UN Security Council buckled and passed resolution 986 that allowed Iraq to sell oil again and use the proceeds - held in a bank account in New York - to buy humanitarian supplies. Essentially this meant food. Within 48 hours of the resolution being passed, a wheat board team was back in Baghdad looking for business. Old friends like Saleh and Zuhair were there to welcome them. Mark Emons told the press: "We have maintained the contact, if not the supply."
More than a million tonnes of wheat a year were soon leaving Australian ports for Iraq. As Hogan told the Cole inquiry this week: "It was huge. It was profits and money all round." The trade prospered despite missile strikes, the 1998 build-up of allied forces in the Gulf and one major irritant: the presence of Australia's Richard Butler as head of the UN inspection teams.
FOR ALL Australia's culpability in what followed, the UN has to bear the principal blame. In 1998, Iraq persuaded the UN to allow port fees to be charged at Umm Qasr on the Persian Gulf. This was the very thin edge of a very thick wedge. The UN's legal office placed one sensible and one impossible condition on these payments: they had to be reasonable and they had to be paid in Iraqi dinars.
But under sanctions there were no dinars to be had in the outside world. In his encyclopedic report on the oil-for-food scam, Volcker found the dinar-only rule "essentially required companies that were assessed port charges either to violate sanctions or decline to trade with Iraq". The UN committee that supervised Iraq sanctions discussed but never resolved the dinar dilemma. Volcker concluded: "It ultimately acquiesced in these illegal transactions."
Port charges in 1998 were followed by "trucking fees" in 1999 and "after sales service" in 2000. All in hard currency. Together these would reap a sanctions-busting $US1.5 billion to which AWB would contribute the single largest share: $US290 million.
The UN concentrated all its efforts on vetting contracts that might deliver weapons to Saddam. Once Iraq realised its new fees were not being scrutinised, the sums it charged went through the roof. Still no alarm bells rang in New York. A recent article in the New York Review of Books suggests that of the tens of thousands of contracts passed by the UN's 661 Committee, only two were put on hold "because of allegedly high service-related components".
Where was Australia in all this? AWB - privatised in 1999 and floated for $100 million in 2001 - knew what the fees were about from the start: direct trading with Iraq in contravention of sanctions. Documents and testimony to the Cole inquiry put that beyond reasonable doubt. But AWB did not hide from the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade the fact that "trucking fees" were being paid.
AWB hid their size, that it was also paying "after sales service" and other fees, that all these were paid in hard currency and were going to Iraq via a front company called Alia. But AWB contracts passing over the department's desks in Canberra and New York from 1999 onwards bore the trade jargon "FIT all governates Iraq" i.e., free in truck (delivered) throughout Iraq.
The Prime Minister, the Minister for Trade, Mark Vaile, the Foreign Minister, Alexander Downer, and their various departments are now hunkered down denying knowing anything about the kickbacks, anytime. Press reports have focused on several points in this story - before and after the invasion of Iraq - when "red flags" went up that should have alerted authorities something was rotten in these AWB deals.
But all Australian authorities had to do to fulfil the duty accepted back in 1991 to police the sanctions against Saddam, was to ask AWB every time it saw a trucking component in a contract: where did you get your dinars? A sanctimonious question, perhaps, but once AWB stumbled on that question, the whole scam would be laid bare.
But no one asked. Australia wasn't alone in this. It seems the world turned a blind eye to the corruption of the "humanitarian" trade with Saddam. It's just that Australia was such a spectacular malefactor while joining the Coalition of the Willing to fight a war justified - or excused - by the failure of sanctions to bring down Saddam.
On the latest count, as many as 100,000 Iraqis have died since the invasion as well as more than 2000 US servicemen. The cost is in the hundreds of billions of dollars.
There was more bad news this week: since the kickback story broke, Iraqi trade officials are thinking of turning to AWB's deadly competitor to buy wheat. A spokesman said: "We are seriously considering the American firms."

...The council directed every country in the world to police the sanctions "to maintain such national controls and procedures to ensure compliance"



What exactly did the Liberal government do... to stop the corruption?

The CWB is sure fired up to stop anyone from finding out!

Remember this?

CBC Manitoba:
WINNIPEG – The Canadian Wheat Board is demanding a retraction from Saskatchewan MP David Anderson for comments he made in the House of Commons.

Last Friday, Conservative MP David Anderson stood in the House of Commons and accused the Wheat Board of illegal and corrupt practices in respect to a sale by the Saskatchewan Wheat Pool into Iraq's oil-for-food program.

"This directly affects Canadians because 30 per cent of the value of the contract disappeared through shipping delays and what are referred to as transfers to other buyers, whatever they are. That sounds like even more corruption," Anderson said. "How did the Wheat Board and its exporters manage to lose $8 million out of a $23 million illegal deal with Iraq?"
[...]
Wheat Board spokeswoman Louise Waldman says there is no basis to the allegations, which Anderson has declined to repeat outside the House of Commons. By law, MPs cannot be sued for anything they say inside Parliament.

The Wheat Board has asked Anderson to retract the comments. Waldman says as a marketing agency, the board has two things going for it: its product and its reputation.

"We have an extremely high-quality product, and we also have an extremely good reputation," she says. "We're viewed as having a lot of integrity in the international grain business, and our salespeople are extremely well-respected. So we felt that Mr. Anderson's comments threatened or damaged, could have damaged, this reputation."

Or this?

From Steven Edwards April 30, 2005 story:
[...]
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."

The UN directed the New York branch of Banque Nationale de Paris, which later became BNP Paribas, to handle finances for the six-year program, which ended following Saddam's overthrow.

Appearing at the hearing, held by the U.S. House subcommittee on oversight investigations, Everett Schenk, chief executive of BNP Paribas North America, said "some mistakes were made" as the bank processed 54,000 payments. But of the 403 he said "should not have occurred," he said the bank has uncovered no evidence any were "related to any corruption which may have occurred in the oil-for-food program."

Schmidt said the Pool will provide documentation of its shipments to Iraq "if asked by an agency of government that requires information about" them.
The report does not allege that payments were redirected from the SWP to any other party by BNP Paribas.

Later, Claudia Rosset reported in the NY Sun:
[...]
BNP was able, however, to supply Mr. Rohrabacher with the information that whoever might have been in charge of East Star, the company over the period 2000-03 received more than $80 million in BNP rerouted oil-for-food payments that were officially due to a Saudi Arabia-based supplier, Al Riyadh International Flowers, which BNP described as "reportedly" owned by a member of the Saudi royal family, Prince Bandar Bin Mohammed Bin Abdulrahm Al Saud. He is not the Prince Bandar who is the Saudi ambassador to America.

The Prince Bandar in question also turns up personally on the list of BNP's third-party payments, as having received, in 1999, $353,500 rerouted from another of his companies, Zahrat Al-Riyadh. This in turn shows up on the BNP list as having had about $29 million in oil-for-food payments rerouted by BNP in 1999-2000 to the Saskatchewan Wheat Pool.
[...]


The Oil-for-Food Scandal – the Canadian Connection
Charles R. Smith
Tuesday, Jan. 18, 2005
"Its all about the oil" was the chant issued by a vast army of protesters around the world.

Yes, it may have been "all about the oil" – but it didn't involve Americans, who did not own any of the oil in Iraq, but rather a horde of rich global fat cats who wanted to make millions in a so-called U.N. humanitarian program.
Story Continues Below


One of those who made out like a bandit is a rich Canadian whose bank made millions and whose Paris-based holding companies include the originally French-Belgian oil company TotalFina Elf, which cut lucrative deals with Saddam's Iraq and is currently operating in war-torn Sudan.
Various congressional committees have launched hearings into what has been described as the biggest corruption scandal in history. Not surprisingly, U.N. officials have refused to cooperate with the congressional investigations.

The investigations have turned up a number of damning facts that point directly to the incompetence at best, complicity at worst of the most senior U.N. officials and those involved.

It is now well known, for example, that U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan's own son was getting big cash payments from a Swiss firm that profited from the program, in return for his "expert" opinions and advice. Recently published evidence shows that Annan's son was paraded as a high-level contact within the U.N.

The congressional investigations have surfaced preliminary accounting figures that show that Saddam Hussein likely siphoned off as much as $15 billion, almost a quarter of the entire funds transferred.

While the anti-U.S. critics wailed at the impact of the embargo on the Iraqi people, their attention miraculously centered on the nation that liberated the victims of Saddam's original aggressions – and not on the Thug in Chief or his numerous continental 'partners'.

Free to "govern," Saddam did so with a vengeance, and the rest, as they say, is history – which, thankfully, Congress is now exposing after the U.S. military put an "Out of Business" sign on Baghdad.

Hussein was not alone in his corruption, and several others involved in the money flow, including government firms and politicians in Europe, are now nervously following the investigations while checking out one-way flights to Paraguay.

BNP Paribas

Top among these is the European-based BNP Paribas bank, which the U.N. chose to administer the program and which reportedly received nearly $1 billion for its efforts. Congressional investigators reviewing the bank's actions have discovered broken rules, missing documents and improper transfers by BNP Paribas, which up until now has been assumed to be a French bank.

In fact, BNP Paribas is actually controlled by Power Corporation, an appropriately named Canadian company that has a shocking track record of 'business' relationships with the worst gangsters and tyrannical regimes in the world.

BNP Paribas also has one other distinguishing feature: a direct corporate and familial relationship with the persons running the government of Canada for the last 20 years.

The truth about BNP Paribas and Power Corp. sheds a new light on Canada's seemingly bizarre anti-American foreign policy in the Middle East, in China and elsewhere.

BNP Paribas bank is part of a holding company, Pargesa Holding, which is jointly owned and controlled by the Frère and Desmarais families. Paul Desmarais Sr. is the chairman of the group, while Albert Frère is the vice-chairman. Gerald Frère, Albert's son, is one of three general managers who oversee day-to-day operations, and Paul Desmarais Jr. is also an officer.

Pargesa, and thus Power Corporation and the Canadian Desmarais family, holds a controlling significant stake in TotalFina Elf, the Belgian-French petroleum multinational corporation formed from the merger of Total and Petrofina.

BNP Paribas and TotalFina may have blood-stained corporate histories, but the intimate and intricate connections of Power Corp. to Canada's governing elite raise the truly disturbing questions.

Power Corporation CEO Andre Desmarais is the son-in-law of former Prime Minister Jean Chretien, who went out of his way to oppose U.S. intervention in Iraq, where the family's business interests with the Saddam regime would be jeopardized.

Current Canadian PM Paul Martin is a former Power Corporation employee who made his fortune when he bought Canada Steamship Lines from Power Corp. aided by loans from Power Corp. To this day both CSL and Power are reported to have mutual equity interests in each other.

The most senior foreign affairs/international trade adviser to current Canadian PM Paul Martin is Maurice Strong, former CEO of Power Corp. and a longtime U.N. and Kofi Annan adviser.

TotalFina Elf

So, who is TotalFina Elf? Just an oil company that cut a deal with Saddam to develop and exploit the Majnoon and Nahr Umar oil fields in southern Iraq. These properties are estimated to contain as much as 25 percent of the country's oil reserves.

With Saddam under arrest, the Canadian-controlled company has expanded its "client base" and now has a deal with the murderous Sudanese regime to quietly extract its oil and funnel profits back to Khartoum for its infamous social programs.

Disgusted by the lethargic pace and willful blindness of the U.N.-led investigation of itself headed up by Paul Volcker, the U.S. Congress opened its own investigation. Committee investigators found that eight government agencies notified BNP Paribas about "deficiencies" in handling money in the U.N. program.

No wonder Congress smelled a rat when it watched the deliberately ineffectual U.N. 'review' of the 'Food-for-Oil' program. Thankfully, it followed up on that and launched its own investigations which, if allowed to follow their natural course, will inevitably expose fraud, corruption, sleaze, theft, incompetence and, perhaps in the long run most significantly, the corrupt political and personal motivations of supposedly friendly governments, including Canada, in this entire mess.

For our Canadian friends and supposed partners, we are left with the disturbing question: Who's really in charge and whose interests are they really serving?