Fed: AWB met Aust diplomat but didn't reveal company was a front

AAP General News (Australia)
02-01-2006
Fed: AWB met Aust diplomat but didn't reveal company was a front

SYDNEY, Feb 1 AAP - A senior AWB manager met Australia's ambassador to Jordan a day
after the executive learned that a company the wheat exporter was dealing with was a front
for Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein's regime, an inquiry has been told.

But it appears that Australia's top diplomat in Amman, John Tilleman, was told little,
if anything, about what AWB's sales chief Michael Long knew about the workings of Jordanian
transport company Alia.

Mr Long said AWB had only given him permission for a "general" conversation with the
ambassador, and he did not tell Mr Tilleman he had found out that Alia was a conduit for
money to Saddam.

"No I wouldn't have said that to Mr Tilleman," Mr Long told the Cole inquiry into the AWB.

Today's evidence raises further questions about links between Australian diplomats and AWB.

It follows confirmation Australia's then ambassador to the United States lobbied Congress
in 2004 to drop an investigation into allegations the wheat exporter paid kickbacks to
Iraq.

Alia was a front for the Iraqi government and funnelled $300 million of AWB's money
to Saddam's regime between 1999 and 2003 - kickbacks the dictator demanded to bypass sanctions
and rort the UN's oil for food program.

Mr Long today the commission of inquiry investigating the affair that he was sent to
the Jordanian capital in the first week of October 2005, just weeks before the UN's Volcker
inquiry handed down a damning report on AWB's involvement in the oil for food scandal.

He said that his mission was to discover whether Alia - a company AWB had been dealing
with for six years - was providing a genuine trucking service, and to "discover what its
position would be to the Volcker committee".

On October 4, Mr Long met Alia's general manager, Othman Al Absi, who told him Alia
was 49 per cent owned by Saddam's Ministry of Transport.

Mr Al Absi also told Mr Long that Alia did not truck any Australian wheat around Iraq.

It contracted out 40 per cent of its operations to Iraqi government companies and the
remainder to other Iraqi firms.

Those details were not discussed when Mr Long met Mr Tilleman in a hotel lobby the
next day, Mr Long said.

"I don't think I went to that level of detail," Mr Long said.

Asked if he told the ambassador he had learned that Alia was half-owned by Saddam's
government, Mr Long initially said "I may have said that", but then admitted he could
not remember.

Mr Long's written report on his mission, tendered to the inquiry today, describes the
meeting with Mr Tilleman as "good chat, his response was 'Your briefing is what I expected
to hear'."

Mr Long told the inquiry he would have told Mr Tilleman that he was "asking some questions
of Alia", but the conversation mostly involved market conditions and strategic issues.

The AWB executive said he met regularly with the ambassador when he visited Jordan.

The inquiry continues.

AAP rp/jm/de

KEYWORD: AWB AMBASSADOR

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