The Australian Security Schandle - UWS caught up in corruption scandal

UWS caught up in corruption scandal
The University of Western Sydney has been caught up in a case before the NSW corruption watchdog involving a Sydney security company that paid bribes and funded annual trips to Las Vegas to help secure millions of dollars worth of contracts.

The Independent Commission Against Corruption said it would extend the scope of the initial two-week hearing.

UWS is among at least eight public sector agencies caught up in the scandal involving Kings Security Group.

The commission is looking into allegations a facility services manager for UWS’s Bansktown campus received bribes in return for providing confidential information and assistance to help the company win a $1 million contract.

The scandal that won't go away

IN 2006, Kevin Rudd, a Labor frontbencher then barely known to the wider public, described the payment of kickbacks to Saddam Hussein's regime by Australia's grain marketer as ''the biggest corruption scandal in Australian history'' and ''one of the biggest corruption scandals that we have ever seen around the world''. Six years later, these judgments stand. No one disputes that AWB's payments to Baathist officials, masked as transport levies, flagrantly flouted the United Nations' oil-for-food program. And yet no criminal charges have been laid against any of the figures prominently involved in the direction of AWB during the time in which the kickbacks were paid.
Only one conviction of any kind has been recorded: last week, Andrew Lindberg, who quit as chief executive of AWB in 2006, just as the Cole inquiry into the affair was beginning, admitted in the Supreme Court that he had failed in his duty of oversight. In a civil case brought by the corporate regulator, the Australian Securities and Investments Commission, Mr Lindberg agreed to pay a $100,000 penalty, and if the court agrees he will be barred from managing companies until 2014. He did not admit any malfeasance in the payment of $300 million in kickbacks to Iraq. It is surely a very modest outcome to ''one of the biggest corruption scandals in the history of the world''.
http://m.smh.com.au/opinion/editorial/the-scandal-that-wont-go-away...