Mission & Justice

Caroline Overington; 11/7/08

Two of India’s top public servants have been arrested in connection with corruption in the $300 million wheat trade between Australia and India. The arrests come two years after the Howard government stymied an investigation into the Indian wheat scandal, which allegedly occurred in 1998, when the Australian Wheat Board was a statutory authority under the government’s supervision. The case centres on the purchase of two million tonnes of Australian wheat at “exorbitant prices”, and the payment of $2.5million in commissions to bank accounts in the Cayman Islands in February 1998. India’s Central Bureau of Investigation, or CBI, wanted to investigate the scandal in 2001, 2004 and 2006, but officials said the Howard government repeatedly refused to assist the Indian police with their inquiries.

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Caroline Overington; 2/7/08

The Iraqi Government will use the commonwealth’s five-volume Cole report into AWB’s kickbacks to Saddam Hussein as evidence in its $10 billion lawsuit against the wheat exporter. The Cole report, which was commissioned by the Howard government in November 2005, provides Iraq with more than 10,000 pages of damning evidence against AWB. It has been formally attached to a lawsuit brought by the Republic of Iraq, on behalf of the people of Iraq, lodged in the US District Court in New York on Friday. The lawsuit seeks to make AWB and its executives “accountable for their actions” infunnelling money to Saddam’s regime in breach of UN sanctions.

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