Australia's monopoly wheat exporter AWB Ltd yesterday again denied that it paid kickbacks into Arab bank accounts controlled by members of Saddam Hussein's regime to secure wheat sales.
It also said it had not been contacted by the United Nations or other official bodies over allegations of past corrupt deals.
This followed a report from Baghdad on Wednesday that quoted unnamed Iraqi and occupation officials as saying that Australian, US and other foreign firms paid secret commissions to Saddam's government to secure contracts under the past United Nations oil-for-food programme.
The Reuters report said that after the invasion of Iraq last year, the US-led occupation authority reviewed and amended 3,500 unexecuted contracts worth $8 billion to remove a 10 per cent surcharge for kick-backs.
Contracts and UN documents showed that after the invasion AWB agreed to amend a December 14, 2002 contract for up to 525,000 tonnes of wheat to reduce the price by 10 per cent, the report said.
"All our contracts were above board and AWB paid no kickback or 10 per cent to the Saddam regime out of our wheat contracts," AWB spokesman Peter McBride said yesterday.
The United Nations last month launched an investigation into claims by the US General Accounting Office that the former Saddam government syphoned off billions of dollars from aid programmes between 1997 and 2002.
AWB had not been contacted either officially or unofficially by the UN or Iraq's Coalition Provisional Authority over any investigation into past wheat deals, McBride said.
"All our contracts were approved by the UN under the oil-for-food programme," he said.
"Contracts with the UN are commercial-in-confidence and we acted with the utmost integrity in all our dealings," he said.
Asked if contract prices had been reduced by 10 per cent in re-negotiations after the toppling of Saddam, McBride said any price reductions, not necessarily of 10 per cent, came about because of negotiations with the UN's World Food Programme over current world wheat market prices.
"All our contracts are public tenders and commercial-in-confidence," he said.