Australian Prime Minister John Howard said on Thursday his government was misled by the country's wheat exporter about its oil-for-food deals in Iraq, which a U.N. report said involved multi-million dollar kickbacks, Reuters reported. Testifying at an official inquiry into reports wheat exporter AWB Ltd. allegedly paid kickbacks to Saddam Hussein's regime, Howard said he was aware U.N. sanctions were broken, but he did not know at the time that any Australian company was involved. A 2005 U.N. report alleged AWB was one of more than 2,000 firms that had paid kickbacks worth $1.8 billion to Saddam's government through the U.N.-managed "oil-for-food" account. "It was public knowledge that Iraq was rorting the oil-for-food programme. I was aware that Saddam had rorted the programme," Howard told the Sydney inquiry, using an Australian expression that means to defraud. "There was absolutely no belief, anywhere in the government, at that time that AWB was anything other than a company of high reputation," said Howard at the hearing, under tight security.
