Trevor Flugge

Trevor James Flugge (/ˌfluːɡi/ FLOO-ghee; born 1 February 1947) is an Australian farmer and businessman. He is best known as a former official of the Australian Wheat Board (AWB).[2] He joined the board in 1984, was chair of AWB in 1995–2002, and was present at meetings in Iraq which were linked to the Oil-for-Food scandal, and an inquiry by the United Nations.

Trevor James Flugge
Born (1947-02-01) 1 February 1947
NationalityAustralian
EducationAquinas College, Perth[1]
OccupationFarmer; businessman

Background

Flugge was educated at Aquinas College, Perth,[3] and became a farmer in the Katanning area.

In 1987, he was an unsuccessful National Party candidate for the seat of O'Connor (against Wilson Tuckey) at the Australian election that year.

Flugge has also served as chair of the Australian Wheat Growers Association, and as a board member of the major diversified company Wesfarmers

Oil-for-Food scandal & the Cole Inquiry

Trevor Flugge was chair of AWB until March 2002, when he was voted off the board by A-class shareholders (wheat growers). He was appointed a consultant to AWB after the vote and travelled to Baghdad later that year, with AWB chairman Andrew Lindberg, to rescue an AWB wheat export deal with Saddam Hussein's regime.

There were later accusations that AWB had paid bribes to secure the export contract. AWB officials agreed to pay $2 million to the Iraqi regime, which would then allow wheat exports to resume. This payment was made by inflating the price of wheat contracts administered by the United Nations Oil-for-Food Program.[4]

Following the 2003 invasion and overthrow of the Hussein regime, Flugge was made a senior adviser to the Iraqi agriculture department.[5]

After the bribery became public in 2005, Flugge denied to the UN's Volker inquiry that he knew about AWB's payments to the Hussein regime. Flugge was also called before an Australian government investigation in 2005, the Cole inquiry. When giving evidence to the latter inquiry, Flugge frequently claimed to have no knowledge of matters discussed at meetings he attended, due to hearing loss.

Footnotes
  1. OWCA - June 2004
  2. Australian Wool Growers Association Archived 6 February 2007 at the Wayback Machine (accessed:13-03-2007)
  3. OWCA, June 2004
  4. The Age - The Odd Stray Shot (accessed:13-03-2007)
  5. Transcript - Alexander Downer Interview Archived 18 February 2007 at the Wayback Machine (accessed:13-03-2007)
gollark: But it's the ability to pay more money *specifically* for colleges, via loans and stuff.
gollark: The problem is that if people's ability to pay increasingly high prices is increased a lot, then the ability of colleges to charge high prices is also increased.
gollark: I think that if the price does go massively higher, people will just talk about how important it is and how everyone needs an education and stuff, and it'll be subsidized somehow and/or you'll just have to take out giant loans, instead of just not doing college.
gollark: I'm reading through the backlogs here.
gollark: It's possible to brute-force encryption in theory, but modern crypto makes this very impractical to do given constraints like the available size of the universe and stuff.
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