Kickback: a story about AWB's corporate culture

I have just finished reading Kickback : inside the Australian Wheat Board Scandal by Caroline Overington.

It is a very readable exposition of the AWB saga, structured in a way that tries to makes sense of how AWB came to enter into corrupt contracts with Iraq, what happened when the war began and the UN investigated the contracts and finally the role of the Cole Inquiry and the Australian political context.

It is not a legal or commercial analysis; Overington describes how she got involved in the story even though she had no business journalism background. But by placing her activities in the story as it unfolds she asks commonsense questions and explains the media perspective.

The overall messages are :

How could a reputable Australian company become complicit in corruption?  Is it as simple as not wanting to lose a $1 billion a year customer? Was it a culture of doing business and making money no matter what the ethical cost? whatever it took to get the business done? Did it just believe that if AWB did not agree to Iraq's demands for kickbacks, some other country would and the payments were just a cost of doing business?

How could the Australian Government ignore the warnings about AWB's activities? Did it not investigate AWB earlier because it did not want to know the truth?

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