Alexander Downer (Mayo, Liberal Party, Minister for Foreign Affairs) Share this | Hansard source

First, I do not recall the exact nature of the conversation, but it is true I did have a conversation with Mr Lindberg around that time; I had a brief meeting with him. I do not know if that is exactly what I said; that has been asserted by somebody in the Cole commission. Comments that were made were made on the premise that AWB was not responsible—that AWB had been behaving in a responsible way. My comments were made on the basis that we believed that AWB Ltd had endeavoured to adhere to Australian law and to the United Nations sanctions regime. As to whether they had used this trucking company, as we were of course increasingly finding out through the process of the Volcker inquiry, AWB continued to argue that any payments that went to the Iraqi regime through Alia were inadvertently made to the Iraqi regime. That is what they argued.

Mr Speaker, I can give you a later meeting I had with AWB Ltd, not just that meeting. I can give you a meeting I had with AWB Ltd in about October, which is, I think, the last time I met them. At that meeting, yet again AWB Ltd asserted with great vehemence that they had not knowingly paid any kickbacks to the Iraqi regime. We certainly were of the view—my department was certainly of the view; the government, more broadly speaking, was of the view—that that was the case.

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