Embattled Australian monopoly wheat exporter, AWB Ltd, is going to incredible lengths to keep documents out of the hand of the country’s commission investigating the Oil for Food scandal.AWB has launched a radical move to bar Commissioner Terence Cole from demanding thousands of sensitive documents that detail what its executives and lawyers knew about $290 million of corrupt payments to Saddam Hussein's regime.
The latest battle, despite a new law obliging the document handover, the Federal Court is being asked to permanently block Cole from demanding the obviously incriminating evidence, which AWB claims is protected by legal professional privilege.
AWB shored up billions of dollars of wheat sales to Saddam Hussein's regime by helping Iraq siphon about $290 million from a UN trust account between 1999 and 2003. Some AWB executives claimed the money was the real cost of trucking the Australian wheat from port to Iraq's silos; other AWB managers have told Cole that they and the company always knew it was a scam.
The Senate last week amended the Royal Commissions Act so that Commonwealth commissioners could filter bogus claims for legal privilege. Commissioners can now examine any documents that parties claim are privileged and decide if the claims are genuine, but parties may still appeal those decisions in the Federal Court.
A notice of motion filed by AWB yesterday shows the company wants Mr Cole restrained from calling for, inspecting, using or publishing any of the documents cited as privileged and barred from making any decision about the status of privilege until the Federal Court makes it own ruling on the documents.
AWB also wants the court to declare either that the recent changes to the Royal Commissions Act are invalid or that they are too wide and should not apply to AWB's documents.
2 comments:
From what I have read, the whole "Oil for Food" program was bullshit and set up so poorly it was easy to scam.
No argument there!
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