Italian businessman Ottavio Quattrocchi is a good friend of Gandhi family. Quattrocchi received Bofors kickbacks through Myles Stott of AE Services based in London. ?The statement of Myles T. Stott that the amount Bofors had paid to AE Services was related to the agreement of sale of guns to India; and the trail of subsequent transfers of the money to companies owned by Quattrocchi?from AE Services to Colbar Investments to Wetelsen Overseas,? at page 7 of its judgment, the Swiss Court then noted.
Day-by-day length of this tale is going long and long. Why evil process of covering up this tale is going on? Scott had links with AWB Ltd. He was holding an important post in the company.
Present Indian Government is importing wheat through this company. Why? Volcker had named this company in Oil for Food Scam. AWB Ltd was the biggest exporter of humanitarian goods to Iraq.
This company also has a office in Delhi, India. The present Indian Government is importing wheat through this company. Why? Volcker had named this company in the Oil for Food Scam. As reported by Craig Rowley on January 24, 2006, in 1991, Charles Stott, the then head of International Sales and Marketing for Monopoly Wheat Exporter, the Australian Wheat Board negotiated the physical payment of $200 million of gold owned by Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein to the Australian government against future deliveries of wheat. That'swhat, it says in an article, ?Dealing with the Devil?, which appeared in a March 2003 edition of The Bulletin. No way, as Anthony Hoy uncovers. This was reality. The journey of that gold bullion might have been scripted by Hollywood. But its real authors were a team of international bankers, politicians and a handful of Australians accustomed to trading in the Middle East with suitcases stuffed with millions of dollars. How Australia clinched a deal with Saddam Hussein worth more than US$ 110 metric tons is a tale of international intrigue, subterfuge and government hypocrisy. The first western businessman allowed into Iraq after the ceasefire was an old hand when it came to negotiating wheat deals with Baghdad and was quickly on the doorstep of his longtime friend and trading colleague, Zuhair Daoud, Director-General of the Iraqi Grains Board. The transaction was noted in appropriately sober fashion in Australia'sReserve Bank. He was also the first to re-establish contact with long-time friend Zuhair Daoud, the then Director-General of the Iraqi Grains Board. The counter-intelligence aspect is evident from the fact that, with the Australian government'sapproval, Stott often travelled with more than one passport, an effective method of preventing the Americans and others from following the grain-negotiating trail. After the 1991 Gulf War, Stott'sbrief from the Australian government was to resume the wheat trade with Iraq, but he needed to get around the problem of the Bank for International Settlements, a bank for central banks, freezing Iraq'sglobal assets, the report says. The decision to complete the complex deal rested with the then Foreign Affairs Minister Gareth Evans, who sought advice from the Reserve Bank. Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) governor Bernie Fraser dispatched an assistant governor to Jordan to help Stott. The Americans were never informed, and Fraser came under unprecedented, albeit unsuccessful, pressure to withhold details of the deal from the RBA's1991-92 annual report.
Ultimately, the ten metric tons of bullion means two-hundred wooden crates, each containing four 12.5kg gold bars, were loaded onto a Mercedes wheat truck with just one driver for the furtive drive from Baghdad to Amman, Jordan passing through airports in London and Hong Kong before being reprocessed at the Perth Mint and sold off in small bars and coins. A car carrying an armed guard followed. On the mountainous approaches to Amman, the truck slid off the road. After a night stranded by the roadside, the gold was transferred to a small Bedford lorry, its rear axles groaning under the sheer weight. Some of them in Bangkok with one of the only free Iraq men under UN protection!! On arrival at the Perth mint, the remaining gold, of 99.99 per cent purity was quickly reprocessed and sold off as small bars and coins, mainly to buyers in India. Stott provided Australia'sTerence Cole, QC, with details of the 1995 BHP deal to supply the regime with a US$ 5 metric tons wheat credit. In his testimony, he said that he had talked to DFAT officials about Alia in September 2000, because AWB was having problems getting wheat unloaded in Iraq. He said the government had approved the use of the company. He has a letter, on DFAT letterhead no less than clearly gives AWB permission to use ?Jordanian trucking companies? in Iraq.
(The writer can be contacted at premendra_in@indiatimes.com www.commercialservices.in/)
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