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SYDNEY, Australia (AP) - Australia's monopoly wheat exporter apologized to the public for paying kickbacks to Saddam Hussein's Iraqi regime, in a statement released Thursday by a public inquiry into the alleged corruption.
In the six-paragraph statement, drafted in December, AWB Ltd.'s former managing director Andrew Lindberg acknowledged the wheat exporter made the payments to Saddam as part of the United Nations discredited Oil-For-Food program.
The inquiry investigated whether AWB knowingly paid millions of dollars in kickbacks to a Jordanian trucking company that was part-owned by Saddam's government. Such payments were illegal under the U.N sanctions slapped on Baghdad after the 1990 invasion of Kuwait.
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